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Gene therapies have witnessed a decline in investor interest and many biopharmas have pivoted to more lucrative therapeutic approaches. Last year’s funding figures pale in comparison to how things were in 2021 – a whopping 83 per cent drop in investment. But against these odds, one gene therapy company has been raking in funding over the years, despite not having much pipeline progress to show for it: Kriya Therapeutics. Has Kriya just gotten lucky during these tough financial times, or does it help that the founder’s brother is a billionaire investor and future U.S. political heavyweight?
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Kriya Therapeutics ambitions to make moves in gene therapy space: how far along is it really?
Founded in 2019, North Carolina-based Kriya Therapeutics was set up to develop gene therapies for highly prevalent diseases. It launched with seed funding, and soon after, it snagged $80 million in a series A funding round, with investment from QVT, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, Bluebird Ventures, Narya Capital, Amplo, Paul Manning, and Asia Alpha.
At the time, it was advancing three adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based gene therapy candidates. AAV is widely used in gene therapy as it is not pathogenic and non-integrating since the gene does not insert itself into the person’s genome. The three candidates were KT-A112, KT-A522, and KT-A832 and their development was in collaboration with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The candidate KT-A112 was described as an investigational gene therapy injected into the muscles and designed to deliver genes to produce insulin and glucokinase for type 1 and type 2 diabetes. KT-A522 was designed to deliver the gene to produce a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist for type 2 diabetes and severe obesity – like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Lilly’s Mounjaro – that is injected into the salivary glands. KT-A832 was an investigational gene therapy injected into the pancreas to deliver the gene to produce modified insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1) for type 1 diabetes.
But none of these drugs seem to be in Kriya’s pipeline anymore. Yet, since its inception, it has accumulated a lot of money in funding. Following the series A round in May 2020, it announced the opening of a 51,350 square foot manufacturing facility for gene therapies in the Research Triangle Park – home to hundreds of science and technology companies – in North Carolina. Kriya claimed that this would help scaleup the manufacture of gene therapies at up to 2,000-liter bioreactor scale.
Then, about a year later, with no mention of pipeline progress, the biotech revealed that it had bagged $100 million in a series B financing round. Investments poured in from existing venture capitals as well as new investors, such as Patient Square Capital – which led the fundraise – Woodline Partners LP, CAM Capital, Hongkou, Alumni Ventures, and others.
Then, it kicked off 2022 with a licensing deal with the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Foundation to develop gene therapies for geographic atrophy, a progressive eye disease – a major symptom of it is irreversible vision loss.
More cash flowed in when it secured $270 million in a series C round in May 2022, led once again by private equity firm Patient Square Capital, with participation from existing investors. Meanwhile, Kriya Therapeutics was racking up acquisitions and forging more licensing deals. It acquired New York-based Redpin Therapeutics for an undisclosed amount and gained control over the latter’s epilepsy treatments designed using chemogenetics – the technology to engineer protein receptors to interact with small molecules – to selectively turn on and off problematic neurons.
It had also bought fellow gene therapy company Warden Bio based in New York, which had been developing therapies to address glycogen storage disorders. It signed a deal with California-based drug discovery company Twist Bioscience to create antibodies that it said would later be integrated with Kriya’s AAV technology to treat cancer. However, cancer isn’t on Kriya Therapeutics list of therapeutic indications at present.
Currently, it has nine candidates in its pipeline, most of which have not yet hit the clinic. However, two candidates are in the clinic, namely KRIYA-825 and KRIYA-748. The potential one-time gene therapy KRIYA-825 expresses a fusion protein designed to inhibit the activity of complement C3 and C5 for slowing down vision loss associated with geographic atrophy. Kriya actually doubled down on its geographic atrophy focus when it struck a deal with Israeli drug delivery company Everads Therapy to enhance the delivery of gene therapies to the eyes while minimizing inflammation in 2023.
Its other clinical candidate, KRIYA-748, is designed to treat trigeminal neuralgia, a pain disorder that affects the nerve responsible for sensation in the face and motor functions like biting and chewing. KRIYA-748 is said to express an ion channel when administered as an injection by penetrating the central nervous system (CNS) to reduce the severity and number of pain attacks.
While early preclinical data on its geographical atrophy therapy has been presented at the 2024 and 2025 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) Annual Meetings, much is not known about the progress of these drugs made by the six-year-old company. This isn’t rare for startups, as typically it takes several months to a few years for therapies to get a head start in the clinic. But what is an uncommon phenomenon is the wealth accumulated by companies Kriya Therapeutics, particularly when the field of gene therapy has lost its appeal to investors.
Investments on a low for gene therapies
Once lauded as a breakthrough in medicine to address genetic disorders, investors have pulled back from the space of late. This is largely because of the time-consuming as well as costly process. It can take up to 15 years for a gene therapy drug to receive approval from regulators and these therapies are often very expensive, with some costing millions of dollars, which put them out of reach to many people who need them.
As many investors want quicker returns, and with the turn that obesity drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound have taken in the past couple of years, people have shifted to quicker and potentially more profitable therapies, leaving the gene therapy field high and dry.
Moreover, big pharmas have reined in on research. For example, Pfizer took its gene therapy for hemophilia, Beqvez, off the market earlier this year. Gene therapy pioneer Bluebird Bio, once worth nearly $10 billion, went private for $30 million this year, according to a Reuters report.
Compounded by manufacturing bottlenecks, the gene therapy field has seen funding plummet from $8.2 billion across 122 deals in 2021 to $1.4 billion across 39 venture rounds in 2024, DealForma declared in a Reuters report.
Kriya Therapeutic’s $313.3 million funding plans undisclosed
So, a company like Kriya Therapeutics amassing money over the years and carrying on doing so is unusual. Following its $270 million fundraise, it pocketed an additional $150 million last year and most recently, it raised $313.3 million just last month, bringing total funding to more than $900 million in six years.
With not much to show in terms of clinical data, Kriya Therapeutics has remained pretty hush about how this new money will be spent. To add to that, its vow to bring a gene therapy for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) – a liver disease characterized by excess fat, inflammation, and liver cell damage, now called MASH – in the first quarter of this year has not panned out following its buyout of Barcelona-based Tramontane Therapeutics in 2023.
But does all this have anything to do with the company’s involvement in the U.S. government?
One of its investors back in 2023 was then Senator and now U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who funnelled $50,000 to $100,000 into the startup, which Vance disclosed late last year. But more prominently, the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Kriya Therapeutics, Shankar Ramaswamy, is the brother of billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of Roivant Sciences, who previously ran for U.S. president in the Republican primaries last year, and is running for Governor in the 2026 Ohio elections.
While Shankar Ramaswamy told Biopharma Drive two years ago that “Kriya won over investors with its in-house manufacturing capabilities and ability to develop multiple gene therapies in parallel,” it looks like few of its goals have been met. With candidates disappearing from the pipeline, unmet development deadlines, and a lack of transparency about where the most recent funds will go, it will be interesting to chart the course of the biotech and how soon it will make headway in the clinic.
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