Urania Therapeutics Secures €3.53M Seed Funding to Advance Proprietary 'Readthrough' Compounds for Monogenic Diseases and Nonsense Mutation-Driven Cancers

On November 6, 2019, VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned from foreign media reports that the biopharmaceutical company Urania Therapeutics had raised €3.53 million ($3.89 million) in seed funding. The round was led by Advent France Biotechnology, with participation from Cap Innov'Est.

It is understood that Urania Therapeutics intends to use these funds to strengthen its capabilities and optimize its patented compounds.‘readthrough’, enabling it to select candidate drugs for further advancement. Upon completion of the financing round, the company will focus on transitioning from laboratory research to clinical application, leveraging mechanistic insights at the atomic scale to develop novel therapeutics addressing unmet medical needs.

Urania Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Strasbourg, France, founded in 2015 by its President and Chief Executive Officer, Jean-Paul Renaud. The company is dedicated to identifying and developing‘readthrough’Compounds. These compounds can induce the suppression of premature termination codons during protein synthesis, thereby generating full-length proteins that would otherwise be truncated.

By targeting the decoding center of the human ribosome to restore the production of functional proteins, this approach aims to provide new therapeutic options for various monogenic diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and cystic fibrosis (CF), as well as for certain cancer subtypes caused by nonsense mutations, representing a new paradigm in precision medicine.

The founders of this field include ribosome structure experts Marat Yusupov and Gulnara Yusupova, as well as the CNRS Research Director at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France.

Advent France Biotechnology is a French venture capital firm in the life sciences sector, dedicated to advancing healthcare. With the Advent France Biotechnology Seed Fund, the firm has become France’s first specialized life sciences seed fund.

Cap Innov'Est is a €36 million tri-regional fund dedicated to investing in young, innovative startups. Launched in July 2014, Cap Innov'Est has invested in 13 startups to date.

(Compiled by Xiong Hui)