launches with USD 28.5 million Series A investment led by Leaps by Bayer and Morningside Ventures
Summary
Vesigen is developing drugs based on the proprietary ARRDC1-mediated microvesicles (ARMMs) technology, a class of fusogenic extracellular vesicles that nature evolved to package and deliver communication signals between cells and tissues. Vesigen and its scientific founders have demonstrated a wide range of therapeutic payloads can be packaged in ARMMs, including RNA, protein, and gene-editing systems and functionally delivered intracellularly in vitro and in vivo. “We believe that Vesigen’s ARMMs technology has the potential to do exactly that, to help enable new curative treatments in a large spectrum of disease areas.” “Vesigen’s engineered extracellular vesicles show versatility and we will be supporting their development in a wide range of indications, including oncology, neurology, ophthalmology, and other localized applications – We look forward to seeing their work translated into a clinical context,” said Gerald Chan, Sc.D, Morningside Ventures. “We engineered the ARMMs system as a platform capable of delivering several agents into specific tissues or cells that others have been exploring for years,” said Quan Lu, PhD, Professor of Environmental Genetics and Physiology at the Harvard T.H. They are all working on potentially breakthrough technologies to overcome some specific challenges such as, e.g. regenerating lost tissue function, reducing the environmental impact of farming, preventing or curing cancer, and others.