Tiny transcriptome biotech secures Series A to ramp up automated R&D efforts in race towards clinic
07 Sep 2022
Collaborate
A Colorado company is looking to re-up its efforts to expand and go into the clinic, and thanks to some fresh cash from an investing group, the biotech is headed in that direction.
Arpeggio Biosciences announced Wednesday morning that it successfully raised $17 million in a Series A round, two years after a $3.2 million seed round and four years after being initially founded. CEO and co-founder Joey Azofeifa tells Endpoints News that the funding will initially go to pipeline development and automating its compound-screening efforts.
In short, the company focuses on transcription — the act of creating RNA from DNA. Azofeifa said that when the transcription process gets mutated or misregulated in some fashion, you can end up with some pretty impactful disease.
“There’s so many diseases that really start at that transcriptional stage. Finding drugs to fix the transcription is really really hard, generally speaking,” Azofeifa noted. The CEO added that the company’s goal is to go after transcription factors, but conceded such factors are pretty hard to drug by themselves.
The way the company plans to solve it? Instead of targeting the transcription factors directly, the CEO said that Arpeggio is attempting to design and screen molecules that can alter the transcriptome, essentially all RNA transcripts in an individual cell or a group.
What Arpeggio is doing now is utilizing a robotics lab — 100% automated — to screen different compounds, test them against different cells and see if they’re effective in certain pathways. However, the company plans to go bigger with this $17 million, including leasing its own lab space and moving out of its current digs at the University of Colorado.
And while the company wants to screen hundreds of thousands or even a million compounds at a time, Azofeifa noted that the automated lab works well for the company and allows for more reproducible data.
To that end, the company currently has three programs in preclinical development. The lead candidate is currently focused on mesenchymal tumors, a type of cancer also known as connective tissue tumors.
While Azofeifa did not divulge the exact mechanism behind the candidate (it’s the company’s “secret sauce,” as the CEO put it), he did say that what the company is trying to elicit is a non-canonical form of cell death. Non-canonical here means a concept that is given to new features or capabilities in an established pathway.
As for clinical plans, Azofeifa said that in approximately two years, the biotech will decide whether it wants to partner with another company on its lead program, or instead raise a Series B to run the program through clinical studies on its own.
The other two candidates are being researched in lung adenocarcinoma and for an undisclosed autoimmune/inflammation indication. The latter is involved in a partnership with Intrinsic Medicine.
As for additional partners, the biotech said it has worked with about 40 other pharma companies, assessing the effects of certain compounds on the transcriptome and selling that info back to those companies.
The company currently has only 11 employees — and as part of the financing, the biotech is looking to increase that number to about 20 over the next year or two.
The Series A round was led by Builders VC, an early stage tech VC that claims to invest in companies to “modernize antiquated industries.” On top of that, a few notable seed investors also jumped in on the round, including Khosla Ventures, Fifty Years and Verge Genomics CEO Alice Zhang. New investors included Tencent and Tau Ventures, among others. Azofeifa added that it got connected with Builders through a mutual friend.
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