Kriya Therapeutics Scores $270 Million to Support Gene Therapy Pipeline

 Kriya Therapeutics secured $270 million in Series C financing that will be used to support the advancement of the company’s fully integrated gene therapy pipeline and expand its engineering, manufacturing and computational platforms.

Since the turn of the year, Redwood City, Calif.-based Kriya, which was one of BioSpace’s “Class of 2021” life sciences startups to watch, has expanded its gene therapy programs through the acquisition of exclusive rights to preclinical assets from Warden Bio, as well as an antibody discovery agreement with Twist Bioscience.

In January of this year, the company forged an exclusive agreement with the Medical University of South Carolina Foundation for Research Development to license next-generation complement-targeted gene therapies for the treatment of geographic atrophy, also known as atrophic age-related macular degeneration, and other ocular diseases.

The company also scaled its machine learning-enabled technology and cloud computing architecture, dubbed Sirve. The scaling was critical in order to support the integration of large datasets generated by the company’s high throughput screening, next-generation sequencing, and algorithmic data mining platforms, Kriya said.

In addition to the expansion of its pipeline and technology platform, Kriya also opened the doors to its new scalable GMP manufacturing space in North Carolina that will bolster the manufacturing of its gene therapies for oncology, diabetes, severe obesity, ophthalmology and other indications.

Shankar Ramaswamy, co-founder and CEO of Kriya, said the company was founded on the vision of addressing some of the issues related to the earliest generations of gene therapies. The Series C financing will support the company’s continued growth as it pushes into the clinic and scales its platform.

“We believe gene therapy has the potential to redefine medicine over the next decade. However, the field has been constrained by technological and operational challenges that make it difficult and expensive to deliver new products,” Ramaswamy said in a statement. He added that the financing will allow the company to “achieve our ultimate vision of expanding the reach and unlocking the full potential of gene therapy as a modality.”

The Series C financing was led by Patient Square Capital. The $270 million round was supported by Bluebird Ventures, CAM Capital, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, JDRF T1D Fund, Lightswitch Capital, Narya Capital, QVT, Transhuman Capital, as well as other undisclosed investors.

Jim Momatazee, the managing partner of Patient Square Capital and a member of the Kriya Board of Directors, said the company has made “tremendous strides” over the past few years. In addition to the partnerships the company forged, Kriya has also tapped world-class talent and scaled its infrastructure to “unlock the full potential of gene therapy,” he said.

“We believe the company has the potential to be the clear leader in the evolving gene therapy field, consistent with Patient Square Capital’s focus to build and support category leading companies in health care,” Momatazee said in a statement.

For Kriya, the latest financing is more than double the amount it raised less than one year ago. In July 2021, the company raised $100 million in a Series B financing round, which built on the $80.5 million it raised the previous year in a Series A financing round.

https://www.biospace.com/article/kriya-therapeutics-scores-270-million-to-support-gene-therapy-development/