After announcing its launch with a large Seed round in April, a Dallas-based biotech startup has landed one of the largest funding rounds of the year so far to grow and bring some of its products to clinical trial.
Taysha Gene Therapies, a gene therapy startup focused on central nervous system diseases, announced closing on an oversubscribed $95 million Series B funding round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. New investors on the round included BlackRock, GV (which used to be called Google Ventures), Invus, Casdin Capital, Franklin Templeton, Octagon Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Sands Capital, ArrowMark Partners and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners. Also joining the round were founding investors PBM Capital and Nolan Capital. Nolan Capital founder and CEO Sean Nolan will join Taysha’s board.
“We have brought together experts in gene therapy with leading healthcare and institutional investors to create a company that is uniquely positioned to advance the development of potentially curative gene therapies for CNS disease in rare and large patient populations,” Nolan said in a statement.
Founded in a partnership with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Taysha works to develop and commercialize gene therapy treatments. Using a machine learning platform and DNA shuffling technology, Taysha says it can improve therapy delivery and bypass parts of a patient’s immune system response.
With the new funding, Taysha said it plans to begin clinical trials of its initial cohort of therapies and file Investigational New Drug Applications with the FDA. According to the company, it has a pipeline of 17 gene therapy products and exclusive options to acquire four others, which span things like neurodevelopmental diseases and epilepsy. To help with the ramped up production, the company also intends to use some of the funding to build a commercially scalable pharmaceutical production facility.
At the time of its launch, Taysha said it hoped to file at least four initial new drug applications by the end of 2020.
“At Taysha, we are ushering in a new era of gene therapy drug development, one in which we can rapidly translate early discoveries into the clinic and beyond,” said RA Session II, Taysha’s founder and president, when the company launched.
