Tome Biosciences, Inc., a Watertown, MA-based programmable genomic integration company, raised $213m in Series A and B funding.
Backers included Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, ARCH Venture Partners, GV, Longwood Fund, Polaris Partners, Bruker Corporation, FUJIFILM Corporation, Alexandria Venture Investments and others.
The company intends to use the funds to develop integrative gene therapies for monogenic liver diseases and cell therapies for autoimmune diseases.
Led by Rahul Kakkar, MD, President and CEO, Tome Biosciences is a programmable genomic integration (PGI) company whose technologies allow to insert any genetic sequence of any size at any location in the genome with site-specific precision. The company works in the field of genomic medicines, delivering cures to patients through cell and integrative gene therapies.
PGI combines the site-specificity of CRISPR/Cas9 with enzymes capable of inserting or writing sequences of DNA, including entire genes, without the need for double-strand DNA breaks. Tome’s most advanced PGI technology, called integrase-mediated PGI (I-PGI), utilizes proprietary integrases and is based on PASTE technology first discovered by Tome’s Co-Founders, Omar Abudayyeh, PhD, and Jonathan Gootenberg, PhD, while at MIT as investigators. I-PGI can insert large DNA sequences anywhere in the genome with unprecedented precision. Thus far, I-PGI has demonstrated insertions of more than 30kb of genetic code with site-specificity in multiple different dividing and non-dividing cell types, and can be multiplexed to enable complex cell engineering that will underpin the future development of cell therapies. Tome has an exclusive license to the core PASTE technology, which includes granted US patent numbers 11,572,556, 11,827,881 and 11,834,658.
FinSMEs
13/12/2023