The round was led by Casdin Capital with participation from GV, The Column Group, and additional undisclosed new and existing investors. In connection with the Series B round, Eli Casdin, Chief Investment Officer, Casdin Capital, will join Tenaya’s Board of Directors, and Anthony Philippakis, M.D., Ph.D., Venture Partner, GV, will join as Board Observer.
The company, which has raised $142m since its founding, intends to use the funds to advance and to expand its pipeline and to strengthen the science, capabilities, and intellectual property that provide the foundation for its multi-modality product platforms.
Founded by scientists from the Gladstone Institute’s Cardiovascular Division and from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and led by Faraz Ali, Chief Executive Officer, Tenaya is advancing multiple candidates from three product platforms – Cellular Regeneration, Gene Therapy, and Precision Medicine.
The Cellular Regeneration platform uses novel adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors to deliver proprietary transcription factors that can drive in vivo reprogramming of resident cardiac fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes, with an initial focus on acute and chronic injury following a myocardial infarction.
The Gene Therapy platform uses AAV vectors for the targeted delivery and expression of therapeutic payloads to specific cells in the heart, with an initial focus on the treatment of genetically defined cardiomyopathies.
The Precision Medicine platform uses isogenic iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes as human disease models to identify and validate new heart failure targets and to screen for therapeutic compounds, with an initial focus on small molecules for the treatment of several genetically defined dilated cardiomyopathies.
FinSMEs
03/10/2019