U.K. biotech company Nucleome Therapeutics Limited has closed an oversubscribed £37.5 million ($42.4 million) series A financing round.
The funds will be used to advance the company’s autoimmune disease programs, fuel expansion of its dark genome atlas and further develop its pioneering platform.
The financing was led by new investor M Ventures, the strategic, corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA, with participation from Johnson and Johnson Innovation-JJDC, Inc., the strategic venture capital arm of Johnson & Johnson; Pfizer Ventures, the venture group of Pfizer; British Patient Capital, through its Future Fund: Breakthrough program; and founding investor Oxford Science Enterprises.
Nucleome said it can discover and validate first-in-class targets through genetics, by investigating the ‘dark’ region of the human genome, which does not encode for proteins but contains 90% of disease-associated genetic changes. Understanding the role of these genetic variants has been a long-standing challenge, hindering the translation of the human genome into useful drug discovery insights.
Auto-immune disease targets
Nucleome’s platform combines 3D genome technology and machine learning to shed light on these variants by directly linking genes to diseases and mapping pathways with precision for drug discovery.
“We have already made significant progress by mapping genes to genetics in a number of human immune cell types and discovering the first wave of potential first-in-class autoimmune disease targets,” said Danuta Jeziorska, chief executive officer and co-founder of Nucleome Therapeutics.
“The completion of this oversubscribed round with such a high-caliber group of global life science investors is a recognition of the significance of Nucleome’s platform and its potential to support the development of an exciting portfolio of first-in-class targets for autoimmune diseases.”