Atalanta Therapeutics launched in January, announcing partnerships with Biogen and Genentech and $110 million in series A financing. The company was born from work described in a 2019 Nature Biotechnology paper showing that a chemically synthesized siRNA structure enables durable gene silencing in the brains of mice and non-human primates. This new type of oligonucleotide scaffold overcomes the main obstacles to using gene silencing in treatments for neurodegenerative diseases: delivery and durability.
Anastasia Khvorova and Neil Aronin, two of the paper’s authors, founded the company along with Craig Mello, their University of Massachusetts Medical School colleague and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference. Atalanta claims its novel ‘branched siRNA’ oligonucleotide architecture can silence gene expression in the central nervous system and is applicable across multiple neurodegenerative diseases. With Biogen, Atalanta will develop RNAi therapeutics targeting the huntingtin (HTT) gene, whose mutation causes Huntington’s disease, as well as additional unnamed CNS targets. And its strategic collaboration with Genentech is to develop RNAi therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Both partnerships include up-front payments to Atalanta, as well as development and milestone payments and royalty payments on any resulting products.
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