Startups, BioPharma

Mammoth Biosciences raises $45M Series B round for CRISPR diagnostics, therapeutics development

The latest round of funding, led by Chinese investors, brings the total amount of money raised by the company, co-founded by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, to more than $70 million.

dna, genomics

A company developing a means of using gene-editing technology to detect disease has raised its latest funding round to continue its diagnostics work.

South San Francisco, California-based Mammoth Biosciences said Thursday that it had raised $45 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the total amount of funding the company has raised to date to more than $70 million. Decheng Capital led the financing, with participation from Mayfield, NFX, Verily and Brook Byers.

“As a team on the front lines of discovery in CRISPR, we’ve seen firsthand the need for new tools to deliver on the therapeutic and diagnostic promise that this technology has to offer,” Mammoth CEO Trevor Martin said in a statement. “In powering new products in addition to diagnostics, we’re enabling the full potential of our platform to read and write the code of life and to fully transform how we interact with biology.”

Mammoth said it plans to use the financing to help develop its CRISPR-based diagnostics and extend its research to include applications of the technology to include gene editing and therapeutics. It is also looking at partnerships with drugmakers to apply its technology to their efforts. In particular, the company will focus on Cas14, an enzyme that is characterized by an extremely small size, diverse targeting ability and high fidelity.

The company was cofounded by University of California Berkeley researcher Jennifer Doudna, considered one of the pioneers of CRISPR technology. Researchers led by scientist Feng Zhang at The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts – created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – are also considered to have pioneered CRISPR, which over the past few years has led to legal disputes over intellectual property.

Zhang is a cofounder of another company developing CRISPR technology in the area of diagnostics, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sherlock Biosciences. The company raised a $31 million Series A funding round in April 2019, a month after it was founded.

The most common application of CRISPR technology in medicine has been in therapeutics. In July of last year, Editas Medicine and Allergan – which is currently in the process of a $63 billion takeover by AbbVie – initiated the first-ever in vivo clinical trial of a CRISPR-based genome editing medicine, for an inherited form of blindness.

Photo: iLexx, Getty Images

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