Financing led by Patient Square Capital with participation from leading life sciences investors to support the further development of Kriya’s core technology platforms, advancement of its current programs and continued expansion of its pipeline of gene therapies
Kriya Therapeutics, Inc., a fully integrated platform company pioneering novel technologies and therapeutics in gene therapy, today announced the closing of a $100 Million Series B financing to support its mission of transforming the design, development and manufacturing of gene therapies.
The financing was led by Patient Square Capital, with participation from new investors Woodline Partners LP, CAM Capital, Hongkou, Alumni Ventures and others. All existing institutional investors also participated in this round, including QVT, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, Bluebird Ventures, Transhuman Capital, Narya Capital, Amplo and JDRF T1D Fund. Proceeds from the financing will be used to further develop Kriya’s core technology platforms, expand its therapeutic pipeline and advance its current programs in metabolic disease, ophthalmology and oncology.
“In recent years we have seen the promise of gene therapy become a reality for the treatment of a number of devastating diseases. However, the field has been constrained by critical limitations in manufacturing technology, vector design capabilities and cost,” said Shankar Ramaswamy, M.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kriya Therapeutics. “Kriya was formed with the mission of revolutionizing how gene therapies are designed, developed and produced by fully integrating advanced manufacturing technologies, computational tools and development capabilities within a single company. With the support of our new and existing investors, we believe that Kriya is well positioned to deliver transformative improvements in cost, scale and efficiency that will help the gene therapy field achieve its full potential across a range of therapeutic areas.”
Concurrent with the financing, Jim Momtazee, Managing Partner of Patient Square Capital, will join Kriya’s Board of Directors. Prior to Patient Square, Mr. Momtazee spent over 21 years at KKR, where he helped establish the firm’s health care industry group in 2001 and subsequently was head of the Americas Heath Care Investment Team for over 10 years. Mr. Momtazee has spent years on the board of directors of Jazz Pharmaceuticals, HCA, PRA Health Sciences and BridgeBio Pharma, among other companies, and more recently joined the board of directors of Apollo Therapeutics.
“We believe that gene therapy will have transformative impact on medicine over time, and companies that are able to integrate platform capabilities delivering better treatments, lower cost and broader applications of the technology are going to drive that innovation,” said Mr. Momtazee. “With that vision, we are incredibly excited to partner with the management team at Kriya to bring multiple important medicines to patients.”
By combining advances in computer science and vector biology, Kriya is developing its SIRVE™ (System for Intelligent Rational Vector Engineering) platform for de novo vector design, sequence modification and data analysis. SIRVE is deployed to advance Kriya’s internally discovered gene therapy programs and improve first-generation products, with a goal of reducing immunogenicity and improving expression and packaging efficiency. Kriya is also developing STRIPE™ (System to Realize Improved Production Efficiency), a proprietary high-efficiency manufacturing platform integrating advances in cell line technology and upstream and downstream process to achieve exponential reductions in production costs at scale. STRIPE is being developed at Kriya’s 51,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and can support simultaneous manufacturing of multiple products from early research through commercialization. The company’s full cGMP manufacturing infrastructure is expected to be online this year.
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