Restoring human hearing, Boston's Frequency Therapeutics received $32 million in financing
Release date: 2017-04-13
The startup company, The The Therapeutics, located in the Greater Boston area, recently received $32 million in Series A funding. The company's seed round investment comes from CoBro Ventures, including Morningside Ventures, Emigrant Capital Corp., Korean Investment Partnership, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
Frequency Therapeutics was founded in 2015 and is currently the President and CEO of David Lucchino, one of the founders. The other two founders are Dr. Roberg Langer from MIT and Dr. Jeffrey Karp from Harvard Medical School. The company is currently working on progenitor cell activation (PCA), a proprietary PCA platform that stimulates sensory hair cell regeneration in the inner ear for the treatment of hearing loss. The company said it has sufficient funds to operate in the next 12-18 months and plans to launch clinical trials.
Frequency Therapeutics PCA platform (Source: Frequency official website)
Sensory hair cells located in the inner ear of the human ear, or the cochlea, can detect sound. Then they pass this signal to the neurons and eventually to the brain. However, it is felt that hair cells are damaged by noise or other sounds, they cannot reproduce themselves, and they decrease with age.
Dr. Jeffrey Karp, one of the founders of Frequency (Source: Harvard University's official website)
“The ability to regenerate hair cells in the inner ear is in nature,†said Dr. Jeffrey Karp, one of the founders of the company. “Birds and amphibians are capable of regenerating these cells, which provides us with an inspirational foundation. Let us look for similar pathways in mammals. In collaboration with Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary, we have found a small molecular approach to extend progenitor cells from the mouse cochlea. We believe this technology represents the field of hearing loss research. A major advancement will spur new physiological research and genetic screening using drugs, siRNA or gene overexpression."
"There is no treatment to restore human hearing, and the opportunities in this field are very large," said Mr. Luccino. "We know which molecules can hit which genes. We are not going to fundamentally change the underlying biology, but to use the organisms. Learn to strengthen the treatment response."
The company believes that their approach can be extended to the treatment of hearing problems, and its progenitor cell activation platform can be applied to the treatment of skin diseases, digestive diseases and muscle degradation. “Hearing is our first opportunity,†Mr. Lucchino said. “We have a lot of compelling data, but we think we are a Regenerative Medicine 2.0 company.â€
CoBro Ventures co-founder Marc Cohen said that Frequency Therapeutics used small molecules to treat hearing loss and made them look different. Their goal is to use small molecules to achieve the same results as gene therapy and CRISPR technology, which we believe is safer and easier to implement. The current data is very attractive and we are very excited to be able to push it to the clinic in the next 12-18 months.
Reference material
[1] Massachusetts startup Frequency Therapeutics nabs $32 millon
[2] Frequency nabs $32M, will push hearing-loss drugs to human studies
Source: Chuangjianhui (WeChat Inno_Insight)
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