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Boston-based biotechnology company Remedium Bio has raised the initial portion of a planned $10 million Series A financing round to advance a gene therapy platform designed to provide long-lasting treatment while allowing doctors to adjust its effects over time.
The funding round is led by Lifespan Vision Ventures, with participation from Eli Lilly and Company and HKX Capital. Remedium says it plans to bring additional investors into the round before its final close. The new funding will support the company's lead programs and preparations for its first studies involving human participants.
At the center of Remedium's work is a technology called Prometheus. The platform takes a different approach to delivering medicines that patients might otherwise need repeatedly for years.
Many chronic conditions are treated with proteins or peptides that must be given regularly. Remedium wants to provide the body's cells with genetic instructions that allow them to produce a therapeutic protein themselves.
The company plans to use adipocytes, commonly known as fat cells, for this purpose. Following an injection under the skin, fat cells around the injection site would receive instructions to produce a particular therapeutic protein.
In simple terms, the approach aims to turn some of a patient's own cells into small, long-lasting producers of medicine.
However, making a treatment last for years creates an important challenge. A patient's medical needs can change, and a dose that works today may not be appropriate in the future. Traditional gene therapies can be difficult to modify once they have been administered.
Remedium says Prometheus is designed to address this problem by allowing the amount of therapeutic protein produced by the cells to be adjusted after treatment. If the approach works as intended, doctors could potentially change the level of treatment according to a patient's needs rather than being locked into one level of activity.
The company is initially interested in chronic diseases where patients may currently depend on repeated treatments. Its areas of research include endocrinology, immunology, neurology and musculoskeletal conditions. Remedium has identified obesity and type 2 diabetes as important early opportunities for its technology.
There could also be practical advantages to targeting fat cells near the injection site. Remedium says keeping treatment more localized may reduce the body's overall exposure to the delivery system used for the gene therapy.
The technology, however, has not yet been demonstrated in patients. Remedium remains a preclinical-stage company, meaning significant testing is still required before researchers know whether the approach will be safe, predictable and effective in humans.
One of the biggest questions will be whether the cells can reliably produce useful amounts of therapeutic proteins for long periods while still allowing doctors to control those levels when necessary.
The Series A financing will help Remedium move closer to answering those questions through clinical development.
If successful, the approach could offer a different way of thinking about gene therapy. Instead of using it only as a permanent treatment for certain genetic disorders, adjustable gene therapy could potentially become a method for delivering medicines needed over many years.
For now, that possibility remains to be tested. The company's next major challenge will be showing that a treatment designed to last can also remain controllable once it reaches patients.
