Biotech veteran John Maraganore raises $135 million for his ‘next-generation RNAi’ startup
- by The Boston Globe
- Oct 08, 2024
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Keith Bedford
This is an excerpt of an article from STAT, the health and medicine news site thatâs a partner to the Globe. For a full version of this story and related coverage, visit STAT.
John Maraganore, the former CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals turned biotech elder statesman and venture capitalist, is launching a new startup that he hopes can expand upon his previous companyâs success.
His new venture, City Therapeutics, launched Tuesday with $135 million from ARCH Venture Partners, Fidelity, Invus, Rock Springs Capital, Regeneron Ventures, and others, he told STAT exclusively. Maraganore is a venture partner at ARCH, and also holds various positions at Atlas Venture, Blackstone Life Sciences, and RTW Investments.
City Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, Mass., is developing new medicines that use RNA interference, or RNAi, to silence genes and halt the production of harmful proteins. Thatâs a familiar enough story in biotech: Alnylam won regulatory approval of the first RNAi treatment in 2018, and several other such therapies have followed. But Cityâs next step is delivering treatments to hard-to-reach tissues by using new delivery vehicles and smaller versions of RNA molecules called cleavage inducing tiny RNAs, or âcityRNAsâ â hence, the startupâs name.
During Maraganoreâs two-decade stint as Alnylamâs chief executive, the company had spent years figuring out how to send RNA molecules to liver cells, and little time tweaking the RNA molecules themselves. Delivering these molecules to other types of tissues was the key hurdle for the Nobel Prize-winning science, and it was evident from the start that the delivery issue would determine if gene-silencing was a one-trick pony or the next great drug mechanism.
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Alnylam eventually settled on two different methods of delivering gene-silencing molecules to the liver and central nervous system. But other organs have proved more elusive.
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