Japanese and US venture capital specialists have invested $50 million in Series A growth finance to fuel expansion at Transition Bio, which has operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge UK.
The microfluidics-driven drug discovery platform company is using biophysical sciences and AI tools to map and modulate biomolecular condensates.
The Series A has been led by Northpond Ventures (Maryland), with participation from Taiho Ventures (Japan), Bristol Myers Squibb (New York), Lifeforce Capital and Magnetic Ventures – both based in San Francisco.
Greg Miller, chief executive officer of Transition Bio, said: “We are excited to have such a high-quality group of investors alongside us as we apply and expand our one-of-a-kind predictive approach to analysing and modulating biomolecular condensates.
“The technology and tools we have built – and the data we are generating – are unmatched in capability and scale, and the pace and depth of our progress across all areas of the company has been extraordinary. Our team is uniquely suited to harness the fundamental and largely untapped biology of condensates which is at the centre of many disease pathways.”
The money will accelerate the progress made to date with the company’s novel Condensomics™ platform. This utilises microfluidics to drive high-throughput generation of proprietary data to enable machine learning-guided condensate target identification and drug discovery.
The funding allows rapid expansion of the technology by scaling up the platform and translating the science across a variety of targets and disease areas.
In addition, Shilpi Arora joined Transition Bio as senior vice-president of discovery research and brings extensive experience in leading multiple aspects of drug discovery, target identification and validation, pharmacology and translational sciences from previous roles in both academia and the biotech industry.
Prior to joining Transition Bio, Shilpi was vice-president of discovery and translational biology at Exo Therapeutics and previously held roles at X-Chem Pharmaceuticals, Constellation Pharmaceuticals and the Translational Genomics Research Institute.
Shaan C. Gandhi – director and head of the biotechnologies group at Northpond Ventures – has been appointed to the company’s board. Alfred W. Sandrock, Jr., chief executive officer of Voyager Therapeutics and former head of research and development at Biogen, has become an independent director. Co-founders Kelly Martin and Samuel Cohen, will continue to serve on the board as executive chairman and director, respectively.
“On behalf of the founders, we are delighted and amazed by how far the team has come in such a short period of time,” said Martin. “This financing is a testament both to the underlying scientific foundation, created through the tremendous work and innovation of Dave Weitz and Tuomas Knowles over the past decade, as well as to the talented team of dedicated and enthusiastic professionals working with us in the US, UK and beyond.”
Transition Bio launched in September 2020 with a seed round led by Lifeforce Capital. The microfluidics-driven drug discovery platform company is working to establish a one-of-a-kind technology platform to revolutionise condensate drug discovery.
With a physics-first approach that enables proprietary data generation that in turn maps condensate behaviour on an unprecedented scale, it aims to be the leading technology and data-driven company in the new and rapidly expanding field of condensate cell biology.