Laronde Aims To Advance Its eRNA Therapies In Eight Weeks, And Has $440m To Help

Laronde has ambitious goals for its big biological concept of endless RNA (eRNA) therapeutics and has raised the money it needs to bring the company’s first drug candidates into the clinic by 2023. The Flagship Pioneering-founded firm will use the $440m in series B venture capital that it announced on 30 August to expand its team and build its “Gigabase Factory,” the lynchpin in its plan to advance therapeutic candidates from idea to in vivo proof of concept in eight weeks.

Cambridge, MA-based Laronde was founded in 2017 and came out of stealth mode in May, revealing that Flagship had invested $50m to date in the company’s eRNA platform for the development of engineered RNA that can be programmed to express therapeutic proteins in the body with the ability to redose patients as needed and tune treatments for the desired level of protein expression