RhyGaze, a biotechnology company based in Basel, Switzerland, and Philadelphia, PA, announced that it has raised a Series A funding round of $86 million. The funding round was led by GV (Google Ventures), alongside Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital, and founding investors BioGeneration Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund, who contributed $11 million to an earlier seed round.
RhyGaze was launched on IP exclusively licensed to the company by the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), a scientific institute led by Director Botond Roska, M.D., Ph.D., a scientific co-founder of RhyGaze. And this funding will enable further development of RhyGaze's lead clinical candidate, a novel gene therapy for optogenetic vision restoration in diseases causing blindness.
The activities to be supported include formal pharmacology and toxicology testing, a non-interventional, observational study to assess potential clinical endpoints in patient groups eligible for the therapy, and a first-in-human clinical trial to test the safety, tolerability, and potential efficacy of the lead candidate.
KEY QUOTES:
"This program exemplifies a key goal of IOB: combining our deep understanding of retinal biology and vision with breakthrough technologies to develop novel therapies for vision loss."
- Dr. Roska
"We are excited to see this program moving forward because it uniquely presents the opportunity to restore high-resolution vision in blind patients."
- Bence György, M.D., Ph.D., a group leader at the IOB, RhyGaze scientific co-founder and board member and Assistant Professor at the University of Basel
"I look forward to partnering with colleagues at IOB to bring this novel gene therapy to patients, and I am excited about the team we are assembling to pursue this important goal. RhyGaze will determine over the next few years whether the compelling data generated at IOB can translate to clinical outcomes. If that is true, this innovation will have a world-wide impact in improved therapeutics for blindness."