Alltrna has raised another $109 million in a series B to fund the Flagship Pioneering biotech's mission to "stop codon disease" with potential benefits for a range of genetic diseases caused by premature termination codon mutation.
The cash will accelerate the building of Alltrna’s machine learning-driven platform to combine tRNA sequences and modifications and accelerate its initial candidates towards the clinic, according to a Wednesday release.
Led by an all-women team, Alltrna unveiled in 2021 with $50 million from venture creator Flagship to use transfer RNAs (tRNAs) to fight disease. A year and a half on, the biotech has zeroed in on so-called stop codon diseases. The term applies to thousands of rare and common diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, beta thalassemia and many cancers.
“Alltrna’s platform optimizes tRNA nucleotide sequence and modifications to turn tRNA’s sophisticated biology into programmable medicines with powerful potential therapeutic properties,” said CEO Michelle Werner, who is also a CEO-partner at Flagship. “For the first time, we have the opportunity to universally treat Stop Codon Disease, which encompasses thousands of rare and common human diseases driven by PTC mutations, giving millions of patients the chance at a treatment in years not lifetimes.”
Since launch, Alltrna has been working on confirming the platform’s ability to create therapies that can restore disrupted protein production for thousands of diseases that have the same genetic mutation, according to Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., origination partner at Flagship and co-founder and board director at Alltrna.
The series B was led by Flagship with unnamed “top-tier” investors joining, according to the release.