GRO Bio Secures $60M for Gout Drug Development

GRO Biosciences has recently secured $60.3 million in funding, which the biotech firm plans to allocate towards advancing its leading gout treatment into clinical trials. Gout is a condition characterized by high levels of uric acid in the blood, leading to the formation of painful crystals in joints. Currently, Horizon Therapeutics’ Krystexxa is the only approved biologic treatment for uncontrolled gout. However, a challenge with Krystexxa is that some patients develop anti-drug antibodies (ADAs), which neutralize the uricase enzyme, diminishing its efficacy.

GRO Biosciences aims to address this issue with its uricase enzyme therapy, ProGly-Uricase, which is designed to prevent the formation of ADAs. This would allow patients to maintain control over their serum uric acid levels over an extended period. The fresh funding will enable GRO Biosciences to bring ProGly-Uricase into a phase 1 clinical trial for patients with elevated uric acid levels.

In addition to moving ProGly-Uricase into clinical trials, the new funding will also be used to expand the company's pipeline of treatments and to further develop its genomically recoded organism (GRO) platform for scalable therapeutic production. The series B funding round was co-led by new investors Atlas Venture and Access Biotechnology. As part of the investment, Atlas partner Kevin Bitterman, Ph.D., and Access Biotechnology’s Managing Director Dan Becker, M.D., Ph.D., have joined GRO Bio’s board.

The funding round also saw participation from previous investors including Redmile Group, Digitalis Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors, alongside Leaps by Bayer, which led GRO Bio’s $25 million series A in 2021. With this latest infusion of capital, GRO Bio has now raised over $90 million to date.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, GRO Biosciences leverages synthetic biology to expand the amino acid alphabet, with the aim of developing new treatments for autoimmune diseases. The company’s technology is designed to treat such diseases without broadly suppressing the immune system, instead offering highly specific tolerance to disease-causing autoantigens.

According to CEO Dan Mandell, Ph.D., the company has already demonstrated the efficacy of its therapeutic approach in preclinical studies and shown the scalability of its GRO platform. The new funding will support the company in advancing to a clinical-stage entity. Mandell highlighted that this financing will allow GRO Bio to gather valuable clinical efficacy data in gout and further develop its platform to enable the scalable production of proteins with multiple non-standard amino acids (NSAAs). These include various payloads for drug delivery, immune recruitment, and tissue targeting.

While GRO Bio is moving forward with its plans, it is not alone in its efforts to challenge the market position of Krystexxa. For instance, Selecta Biosciences and Sobi have produced phase 3 data indicating that their SEL-212 candidate, ImmTOR, can potentially match the efficacy of Horizon’s Krystexxa, despite requiring less frequent administration.