WaVe Life Sciences, a Boston, MA- and Japan-based provider of nucleic acid therapeutics, raised $18m in Series A funding.
The round was led by RA Capital Management LLC and Kagoshima Shinsangyo Sosei Investment LP with participation from founding investor SNBL Ltd. In conjunction with the financing, Dr. Peter Kolchinsky, a managing general partner of RA Capital, joined WaVe’s board of directors.
The proceeds will fund the advancement of the company’s pipeline of stereopure nucleic acid therapeutics, including antisense and exon-skipping drug candidates, which are being developed to treat diseases across multiple therapeutic areas.
Founded by Gregory Verdine (Harvard University) and Takeshi Wada (Tokyo University of Science) and led by Paul Bolno, M.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, WaVe is establishing a drug discovery platform capable of producing defined oligonucleotide structures. The technology, when applied to antisense, directs cellular machinery to disable mRNA through cleavage at defined, predetermined sites, which enables targeting of specific disease-causing genetic variants, known as alleles.
FinSMEs
02/02/2015