GenEdit is sailing toward the clinic with a new name and fresh funding.
The biotech on Wednesday pulled back the curtain on its rebrand to BreezeBio, while also announcing that it has raised $60 million to take a drug candidate designed to restore immune tolerance in Type 1 diabetes into IND-enabling studies.
Having evolved “from a delivery platform into a therapeutics company,” as CEO Kunwoo Lee, Ph.D., put it in the announcement, the biotech has decided it needs a new name aligned with its current status. BreezeBio said the updated moniker reflects its “momentum in translating powerful delivery technologies into practical, scalable genetic medicines with curative potential.”
San Francisco-based BreezeBio is centered around technology for nonviral delivery of genetic medicines. Over the past six years, the company has landed deals with Editas Medicine, Sarepta Therapeutics and Roche’s Genentech, and raised $50 million from backers including Eli Lilly across a two-part series A round. Those funds supported the nomination of a lead candidate.
The series B round was co-led by Yuanta Investment and DSC Investment, with additional participation from several other new and existing investors.
Building on a platform for delivering genetic medicines to the immune, cardiac, pulmonary and central nervous systems, BreezeBio has developed an immune modulation therapy to treat Type 1 diabetes. The asset, BRZ-101, delivers autoantigens encoded by mRNA and tolerogenic co-factors to antigen-presenting cells.
The goal is to induce antigen-specific regulatory T cells to block the autoimmune response that drives Type 1 diabetes without affecting the rest of the immune system. BreezeBio said the drug candidate has induced antigen-specific immune tolerance in autoimmune disease models, including a mouse model of diabetes, and been well tolerated in mice and nonhuman primates.
With the new influx of funding, BreezeBio will advance BRZ-101 toward the clinic while also continuing to develop its delivery platform, where next steps include enabling delivery of in vivo CAR-T therapies to T cells.
The company is also moving forward in its collaboration with Genentech. Last year, Genentech made the first milestone payment in a package worth up to $629 million, and BreezeBio said in this week's announcement that R&D activities have continued to progress since passage of that first milestone.