Prime Medicine, a Cambridge MA-based biotechnology company, raised $115M in Series A funding and $200M in Series B funding.
The Series A round was led by ARCH Venture Partners with participation from F-Prime Capital, GV, and Newpath Partners. The Series B included all Series A investors, plus Casdin Capital with participation from Cormorant Asset Management, Moore Strategic Ventures, Public Sector Pension Investment Board, Redmile Group and Samsara BioCapital.
The company intends to use the funds to advance towards clinical indications, expand the capabilities of its platform, and to further enhance the promise of Prime Editing. In addition, Prime Medicine expects to employ more than 100 people full-time.
Led by Chief Executive Officer Keith Gottesdiener, MD, Chief Scientific Officer Jeremy Duffield, MD, PhD; and scientific founders David R. Liu, PhD and Andrew Anzalone, MD, PhD, Prime Medicine is advancing Prime Editing, which gene editing technology that acts like a DNA word processor to “search and replace” disease-causing genetic sequences at their precise location in the genome, without resulting in double-strand DNA breaks that cause unwanted cellular changes.
The technology works by using a prime editor protein comprising a Cas nickase domain and a reverse transcriptase domain, together with a prime editing guide RNA (pegRNA) that carries both a targeting sequence and a template for a replacement sequence. The prime editor searches for the specific DNA sequence that needs to be edited. Once located, the prime editor uses the pegRNA’s “replace” sequence to activate the reverse transcriptase domain, which makes a DNA copy of the template carried by the pegRNA, creating a corrected DNA sequence. The corrected sequence then preferentially replaces the original genomic DNA, resulting in a permanent edit of the DNA at the target location.
The company is currently advancing multiple drug discovery programs targeted at liver, eye, ex-vivo hematopoietic stem cell, and neuro-muscular indications.
FinSMEs
14/07/2021