GRO Biosciences has ended the week with an extra $60.3 million in the bank, which the protein therapeutics-focused biotech will use to push its lead gout treatment into clinical trials.
Gout occurs when high levels of uric acid in the blood cause crystals to form and accumulate in and around a joint, leading to pain and swelling. Horizon Therapeutics’ Krystexxa remains the only approved biologic to treat uncontrolled gout. But some patients who receive this uricase enzyme therapy soon develop anti-drug antibodies (ADAs) that clear out the enzyme, according to GRO Bio.
GRO Bio’s pitch is that its own uricase enzyme therapy, ProGly-Uricase, can prevent the emergence of ADAs, allowing patients to keep control of their serum uric acid levels for the long term.
The new funding will be used to take ProGly-Uricase into a phase 1 trial of patients with elevated uric acid levels, as well as to “broaden the GRObio pipeline, and to expand its genomically recoded organism (GRO) platform for scalable production of therapeutics,” per the company.
The series B was co-led by new investors Atlas Venture and Access Biotechnology, the biopharma investment arm of Access Industries. Atlas partner Kevin Bitterman, Ph.D., and Access Biotechnology’s Managing Director Dan Becker, M.D., Ph.D., both joined GRO Bio’s board as part of the financing arrangements.
Previous investors Redmile Group, Digitalis Ventures and Innovation Endeavors were also back for the series B, along with Leaps by Bayer, which led GRO Bio’s $25 million series A in 2021.
Altogether, GRO Bio has now raised over $90 million in capital to date, the biotech pointed out.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company, which aims to “leverage synthetic biology to expand the amino acid alphabet,” also has plans to use its tech to treat autoimmune diseases without broadly suppressing the immune system by conferring highly specific tolerance to disease-causing autoantigens.
“Having proved our therapeutic approach preclinically and demonstrated scalability of our GRO platform, we have assembled the ideal team to advance GRObio to a clinical-stage company,” CEO Dan Mandell, Ph.D., said in the release.
“This financing enables us to acquire valuable clinical efficacy data in gout while expanding our platform to demonstrate the first scalable production of proteins with multiple NSAAs, including simultaneous incorporation of drug, immune recruitment, and tissue-targeting payloads,” Mandell added.
GRO Bio isn't the only company looking to take on Krystexxa's crown. For example, Selecta Biosciences and Sobi produced phase 3 data last year that suggested their SEL-212 candidate ImmTOR can match the efficacy of Horizon's mainstay, despite being administered less frequently.