GRO Biosciences Closes $60.3M Series B Financing
Summary
The company intends to use the funds to advance its lead program into the clinic for the treatment of refractory gout, to broaden the GRObio pipeline, and to expand its genomically recoded organism (GRO) platform for scalable production of therapeutics incorporating multiple non-standard amino acids (NSAAs). Led by CEO Dan Mandell, GRO Biosciences is advancing a lead program, ProGly-Uricase, which is being developed for the treatment of severe, refractory gout, a type of arthritis that causes debilitating inflammation in joints due to excessive accumulation of uric acid. ProGly-Uricase is a proprietary uricase enzyme incorporating the company’s ProGly NSAAs to prevent the emergence of ADAs and enable patients with severe, refractory gout to maintain long-term effective control of serum uric acid levels. ProGly NSAAs contain sugar molecules called glycans that confer precise control over the immune response to proteins. ProGly therapies are also being developed to treat and prevent autoimmune disease without broadly suppressing the immune system by conferring highly specific tolerance to disease-causing autoantigens.