Gaithersburg’s Sirnaomics Inc. has raised $105 million less than a year after doing the exact same thing and telegraphing an IPO.
The company said July 1 it has secured the Series E financing in a round led by existing investor Rotating Boulder Fund, with participation from multiple others.
It comes nine months after the Montgomery County biopharma raked in the same amount, when Sirnaomics President and CEO Patrick Lu said the company was entering its next phase of growth and preparing for an IPO in the near future.
Sirnaomics hasn’t pursued that public offering route yet, though the IPO market is hot for biotech right now. But the latest funding is “another powerful validation” that the company’s clinical programs and technologies “are attracting significant interests from the investment community,” Lu said in a statement.
“We appreciate strong trust and persistent support from our existing investors, and we are very excited with this addition of a well-regarded syndicate of investors for the Series E financing,” he said.
The capital injection will finance the company’s work as it develops novel therapeutics to treat diseases including cancers, viral infections, metabolic diseases and fibrosis. The RNAi therapeutics, as they’re called, use RNA interference technology to shut down disease-causing genes.
In addition, Sirnaomics said it plans to strengthen its large-scale manufacturing capacity so it can keep up with production for its pipeline, which includes treatments for liver, bladder, skin, colon and breast cancers; scar reduction and healing, and liver and lung fibrosis, and influenza, among others.
Sirnaomics also said Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to a phase 1 clinical trial in patients with advanced solid tumors. The company is testing its first intravenous oncology drug, a big deal for the business, Lu said in a statement. “Sirnaomics is currently in a strong position to lead the RNAi community in the development of novel oncology therapeutics,” he said.
The back-to-back $105 million rounds for Sirnaomics followed a $47 million in Series C round in 2019, and another $10 million in government grants and corporate partnerships. The company has raised more than $313 million to date and had a valuation of $613 million at the end of 2020, per data firm PitchBook.
Sirnaomics did not immediately return comment about timing around a potential IPO. We will update this post as we hear back.
A year ago, Sirnaomics spun off RNAimmune Inc., a new company focused on messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines. That company raised $10 million in April to speed up research and development in its mRNA vaccine and drug programs for high unmet medical needs in infectious disease, rare disease and cancer. That followed a $2.35 million seed round in August 2020 to advance its cancer vaccine program as well as its Covid-19 vaccine candidate.
RNAimmune said in the spring that it plans to file an investigational new drug application with the FDA for the coronavirus vaccine candidate before year’s end — which, if cleared, would open the door to clinical trials. Its president and CEO, Dr. Dong Shen, is an alum of AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), with experience in infectious disease, oncology and rare disease areas.
Sirnaomics, headquartered in Montgomery County, has subsidiaries in Suzhou and Guangzhou, China. The company, established in 2007, has since become a leader in its field, focused on targeted therapies for critical human diseases using RNAi technology. Lu founded the company after leaving Intradigm Corp., a Rockville RNAi therapeutics company he co-founded, where he served as executive vice president for six years. He also worked at Novartis (NYSE: NVS) and Digene Corp., and has 15 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry and 25 years of biomedical research.
