Ochre Bio, an Oxford, England, UK-based biotech company developing RNA medicines for chronic liver diseases, closed a $9.6M seed financing.
The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Backed VC, Apollo Health Ventures, Selvedge, Hoxton and Hermes-Epitek.
The company intends to use the funds to advance the development of its RNA therapies and expand their deep phenotyping platform to identify and validate new liver targets.
Led by Quin Wills, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder, and Jack O’Meara, CEO & Co-Founder, Ochre Bio is a biotechnology company developing RNA medicines for chronic liver diseases. The company has built a deep phenotyping platform to identify novel liver targets, validated directly in discarded human livers kept alive on machines. Using deep phenotyping (‘phenomics’), Ochre Bio digitizes liver biology at scale. It has already generated massive amounts of spatial genomics data from freshly donated human livers, and have uncovered hundreds of novel potential liver targets that are currently being validated in their labs.
In addition to deep phenotyping of human livers, the company is able to test therapeutics in explanted livers being maintained extracorporeally. They have developed a full stack GalNAc-siRNA development process, through to validating candidates in these actively perfused human livers.
FinSMEs
21/06/2021