Arbor Biotechnologies raises $215m through Series B round

With this round, the biotechnology firm has raised more than $300m so far.

The funding round was led by Ally Bridge Group, TCG Crossover, and Temasek.

Among the new investors who participated in the round include Deep Track Capital, Great Point Ventures, Arrowmark Partners,  Janus Henderson Investors, Logos Capital, Ono Venture Investment, Illumina Ventures, Piper Heartland Healthcare Capital,  Section 32, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company), T. Rowe Price Associates, Ridgeback Capital Investments, Tao Capital Partners, funds managed by Tekla Capital Management, Woodline Partners, as well as an undisclosed global investment fund.

The Series B round also received investment from strategic partner Vertex Pharmaceuticals besides continued support from existing investors such as ARCH Venture Partners.

As part of the financing round, TCG Crossover managing partner Chen Yu will join Arbor Biotechnologies’ board of directors.

Arbor Biotechnologies CEO Dr. Devyn Smith said: “We are pleased to have attracted capital and support from top investors as well as our collaboration partner, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, to help us achieve our vision of developing curative, next-generation genetic medicines for patients with serious genetic diseases.

“By leveraging our proprietary discovery engine — which applies machine learning and AI to mine our protein database containing billions of proteins — we have successfully built the most extensive toolbox of wholly owned CRISPR genomic editors in the industry. This breadth of tools and IP enables us, and our partners, to approach numerous diseases with gene editing solutions that can be tailored to edit or rewrite the genetic errors that result in disease pathology. This provides us with the ability to target the root cause of genetic diseases.”

With this investment, the company plans to continue advancing ‘toward the clinic’ with its initial focus being on liver and first-in-class treatments for CNS diseases.

Dr Smith added: “While our primary focus has been on developing our bespoke CRISPR nucleases, we are also looking to progress our other precision editing innovations, such as CRISPR transposases.”

Set up in 2016 by Feng Zhang, David Walt, David Scott and Winston Yan, the firm has partnered with Vertex Pharmaceuticals on many gene editing and ex vivo cell therapy programmes to bolster the reach of its nuclease technology.