Tome Biosciences Launches with $213M in Funding, Targets ‘New Era’ of Genomic Medicines
12 Dec 2023
VaccineGene Therapy
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Biotech startup Tome Biosciences emerged from stealth on Tuesday armed with with $213 million in funding from prominent investors and technology licensed from from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tome raised $213 million in Series A and B funding rounds from several investors, including ARCH Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Heath, Fujifilm, Longwood Fund, Polaris Partners, Alexandria Venture Investments, Brucker Corporation and GV.
The startup aims to use programmable genomic integration (PGI) to “create curative cell and integrative gene therapies.” According to Tome, PGI allows inserting a genetic sequence at a user-defined location within the genome.
“PGI represents the maturation of editing technologies, breaking current barriers in genomic medicines discovery,” Tome CEO Rahul Kakkar said in a statement. “PGI is revolutionary in that we can finally reprogram the human genome with an elegance and efficiency previously unimaginable.
Tome contends that the PGI technology combines the “site-specificity” of CRISPR/Cas9 with enzymes that can insert or write DNA sequences without the need for double-strand DNA breaks, according to Tuesday’s announcement. The technology is based on technology discovered by Tome’s co-founders, Johnathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh, while at MIT.
The leadership team at Tome includes former Pandion Therapeutics CEO Rahul Kakkar, who will serve as Tome’s CEO, while Matt Barrows will serve as chief technology officer. Barrows helped lead the scale-up of Moderna’s manufacturing of its COVID-19 vaccineCOVID-19 vaccine. Abudayyeh and Gootenberg will be a part of Tome’s board of directors.
Patients with rare monogenic diseases can have “potentially curative treatments” with PGI-based candidates with a single drug per disease “regardless of genetic heterogeneity,” according to Kakkar.
“And for patients with more common disorders, PGI allows for the creation of cell therapies at the speed of biologics discovery with a complexity that enables the potential for broad use across human medicine,” Kakkar added.
So far, the company aims to create both cell and gene therapies—specifically, a gene therapy treatment for monogenic liver disease and cell therapies for autoimmune disease. Tome did not fully disclose how far along these treatments are. The company noted that it also secured patents for its core technology.
“The ability to control where we insert DNA sequences is a game-changer. It means the field can now move away from random integration and utilize any natural promoter in the human genome, enabling us to orchestrate the tissue location, timing and amount of gene expression,” John Finn, Tome’s chief science officer, said in a statement.
While biotech funding and deals have fallen sharply in 2023, some startups have raised the cash they need. Still, the industry will have raised $24 billion in venture capital funding across approximately 840 transactions by the end of the year, a steep decline compared to the last three years, according to market data firm PitchBook.
Tyler Patchen is a staff writer at BioSpace. You can reach him at tyler.patchen@biospace.com. Follow him on LinkedIn.
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