AAA Vesigen spawns with series A funding

Vesigen spawns with series A funding

US-based precision medicine developer Vesigen Therapeutics has emerged from stealth with $28.5m in a series A round co-led by Leaps by Bayer, an investment vehicle for pharmaceutical and chemicals producer Bayer.

Venture capital firm Morningside Ventures co-led the round, which also attracted Alexandria Venture Investments, the VC arm of life sciences real estate investment trust Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and biotech investment firm Linden Lake Ventures.

Vesigen is developing drugs based on fusogenic extracellular vesicles, parts of a cell which are responsible for signals between cells and tissues.

The vesicles will be engineered to deliver various therapeutic payloads, especially recent drug modalities that have proven challenging to apply in practice, such as gene-edited or messenger RNA replacement proteins.

Robert Millman, Vesigen’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Our mission is to realise the therapeutic potential of many of the new modalities, such as RNA interference, mRNA replacement and gene editing, that have been used to identify and validate targets, but have proven difficult to translate into functional therapeutics due to delivery barriers.”

Jürgen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer, and Jak Knowles, the unit’s vice-president of venture investments, have taken seats on Vesigen’s board of directors.

Morningside’s chairman and CEO, Gerald Chan, has been appointed chairman of the company while Stephen Bruso, an investment professional at Morningside, is also on its board.

The original version of this story appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.

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