RhyGaze, a biotech firm headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and Philadelphia, PA, has successfully secured $86 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was spearheaded by GV (Google Ventures), with participation from Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital, and initial backers BioGeneration Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund, who had previously invested $11 million in a seed round.
RhyGaze was introduced with an exclusive license for intellectual property from the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), which is directed by Botond Roska, M.D., Ph.D., a scientific co-founder of RhyGaze. The recent funding will facilitate the advancement of RhyGaze's primary clinical candidate, an innovative gene therapy aimed at restoring vision through optogenetics in conditions that lead to blindness.
The supported activities will encompass formal pharmacology and toxicology evaluations, an observational study that does not involve interventions to examine possible clinical endpoints in patient populations suitable for the treatment, and an initial clinical trial in humans aimed at assessing the safety, tolerability, and potential effectiveness of the primary candidate.
IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS:
“This initiative represents a fundamental objective of IOB: merging our extensive knowledge of retinal biology and vision with innovative technologies to create new treatments for vision impairment.”
– Dr. Roska
"We're thrilled to witness the progress of this program, as it offers a unique chance to restore high-definition vision for individuals who are blind."
– Dr. Bence György, M.D., Ph.D., serves as a group leader at the IOB and is a co-founder and board member of RhyGaze. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel.
"I am eager to collaborate with my colleagues at IOB in delivering this groundbreaking gene therapy to patients. The team we are putting together to achieve this significant objective fills me with excitement. Over the coming years, RhyGaze will evaluate if the impressive data produced at IOB can lead to tangible clinical results. Should this prove to be the case, this innovation could have a global influence on enhancing treatments for blindness."
– Dr. Katherine High, CEO of RhyGaze and formerly co-founder, President and Head of R&D at Spark Therapeutics
