Date: 2014-11-18
Type of information: Series A financing round
Company: Intellia Therapeutics (USA - MA)
Investors: Atlas Venture (USA - MA) Novartis (Switzerland)
Amount: $15 million
Funding type: series A financing round
Planned used: Intellia Therapeutics has been created in 2014 by Atlas Venture and Caribou Biosciences, together with scientists who have pioneered and shaped the field of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) biology. The CRISPR-Cas9 system has emerged as the leading technology for therapeutic gene modification. CRISPR-Cas9 harnesses the body\'s natural DNA repair machine to enable the repair, knockout or replacement of specific genes in the human genome. Intellia\'s initial therapeutic focus is ex vivo applications, wherein cells are removed from the body (collected from blood or bone marrow), modified to correct disease-causing genes and returned to the patient to therapeutic benefit. Near-term applications include blood disorders, therapeutic protein production and cancer, focused on such approaches as CAR-T and checkpoint inhibitor regulation. Intellia also initiated long-term development of in vivo applications, administered either systemically or locally to correct genes residing within specific cells of the body. In vivo applications include ophtalmic, central nervous system, muscle, liver, anti-infective and other disease states. In addition to founding CEO, Nessan Bermingham, Intellia Therapeutics is led by CSO Thomas Barnes, former vice president of discovery at Eleven Biotherapeutics, CMO John Leonard, former CSO at AbbVie, CTO David Morrissey, former head of siRNA at Novartis.
Others: * On November 18, 2014, Intellia Therapeutics, a new company formed to develop therapeutic products using CRISPR-Cas9 technology for gene editing and repair, announced that it has closed a series A investment round with $15 million in financing led by Atlas Venture and Novartis.
Therapeutic area: Technology - Services
