DURHAM – Ribometrix, a four-year-old startup focused on the use of ribonucleic acid, a nucleic acid present in all cells known as RNA, to target disease, has closed on another $7.8 million in venture funding.
Previous investors Dementia Discovery Fund and Illumina Ventures participated in the round. Last November, Ribometrix raised $30 million.
The firm also named Mike Claymann, an MD, as chair of the board. Clayman co-founded Flexion Therapeutics in 2007 and has since served as its president and CEO,
Hatteras Venture Partners and Pappas Capital are among the firm’s earlier investors. The startup has also received support from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and the National Institutes of Health.
“Novel small molecule therapies that target underlying disease mechanisms are desperately needed for high-unmet, rare/orphan as well as broader population diseases such as Huntington’s Disease, cancer, fibrosis, MS, others,” the company says.
“Targeting RNAs to treat these diseases has been of huge interest, however thus far RNAs have only partially been targeted with oligonucleotides (antisense, siRNA, microRNA) due to lack of systematic small molecule screening and design/SAR tools against RNA.”
The Ribometrix platform is based on the inventions of the company’s scientific co-founder, Kevin Weeks, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
New funds will be used to continue development of the Ribometrix discovery platform.
“This additional investment from two of our earliest supporters demonstrates confidence in our team and scientific approach,” said Michael Solomon, the firm’s chief executive officer. “We appreciate their backing as we advance toward our goal of expanding the universe of druggable targets by identifying and optimizing functionally active RNA modulators.”
