NEW YORK (360Dx) – Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout Glympse Bio today announced it has raised $22 million in a Series A financing round.
Venture Capital firms LS Polaris Innovation Fund and ARCH Ventures led the round and were joined by new investors Charles River Ventures, Gilead Sciences, Yonghua Capital, and Inevitable Ventures. Existing investors GreatPoint Ventures, Heritage Provider Network, and Rivas Capital also participated.
Glympse Bio raised $6.6 million in a seed funding round in 2015 led by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw at Biocon India and Theresia Gouw at Aspect Ventures, the company said.
The new funding will be directed at conducting clinical trials for its technology platform based on activity sensors to noninvasively detect human diseases and monitor drug responses. The sensors are bioengineered to transport to a patient's disease site, directly interrogate the biological activity of the diseased tissue, and then emit a signal that can be detected from the patient's urine.
The initial target for the technology is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which afflicts an estimated 100 million people globally. Glympse Bio said that it has signed multiple collaborations focused on NASH with drug companies. Additionally, it has "built a product engine enabling rapid development of tunable and bioengineered activity sensors for multiple indications including fibrosis, cancer, immunology, and infectious diseases," and its technology has been validated in 10 diseases, the company said.
The financing "will propel our pipeline in NASH and cancer into the clinic, catalyze our product engine to address diseases with high global burden, and advance partnerships with pharma for real-time monitoring of drug responses in patients," Glympse Bio Cofounder Sangeeta Bhatia said in a statement.
The company spun out of Bhatia's lab at MIT, where he is a professor of health sciences and technology.
The firm also announced that Amy Schulman of Polaris, Gouw, and Stan Lapidus has joined its board.