Qiming, Orbimed lead Series A for China's Epigenic
Qiming Venture Partners and OrbiMed Asia Partners have led a USD 32m Series A round for Chinese gene editing therapy start-up Epigenic Therapeutics.
Existing investor Morningside Venture Capital also participated. It follows a USD 20m seed round in August last year featuring Morningside, Kingray Capital, Trinity Innovation Fund, TigerYeah Capital, and FountainBridge Capital.
Epigenic aims to treat various diseases by discovering gene editing technologies and developing gene editing therapies. The company has established programmes targeting metabolic, cardiovascular, viral hepatitis, ocular, and rare diseases since its inception in 2021.
Kan Chen, a partner of Qiming and a medical doctor specialising in cancer and immunotherapy, described the company’s epigenetic modulation technology as globally leading.
"Qiming has been closely following the latest technology development and breakthroughs, and how they can be applied to meet unmet medical needs of more patients,” Chen said in a statement.
“With a passionate and experienced team, the company has been steadily and efficiently moving forward with the development of technology platforms and pipelines. We look forward to Epigenic Therapeutics bringing hope and treatments to global patients soon.”
Epigenic’s core technology platform, Epireg, is positioned as an alternative to traditional cleavage-dependent gene editing tools, which raise safety concerns by altering DNA sequencing. It uses proprietary artificial intelligence to regulate targeted genes or govern the expression of one or multiple genes without changing the sequence of the DNA.
The company claims Epireg has also been proven to precisely and efficiently deliver medicine to target cells and tissues both outside and inside the body in metabolic, cardiovascular, viral hepatitis, ocular and rare disease models.
The Series A capital will be used to support preclinical development work and early clinical validations for two programs, as well as discovery work for future pipelines, an expansion of the leadership team, and investment in technology.
"Epigenetic modulations have shown remarkably superior efficiency, durability, as well as safety profile compared to other genetic tools,” Steven Wang, a partner at OrbiMed, added.
“Epigenetic Therapeutics is a leader in this space and has leveraged the unique advantage of the platform to produce potentially best-in-disease product profile. We are impressed with the preclinical data and the execution capability of the Epigenic Therapeutics leadership team.”
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