CAMBRIDGE, MA– Glympse Bio, Inc., a spin-out from the laboratory of Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D.,. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced that it has raised $22 million in Series A funding.
The proceeds of this round will be devoted to conducting clinical trials for its novel platform which uses bioengineered activity sensors to noninvasively detect human diseases and to monitor drug response, Glympse Bio said in a statement.
“This fundraise 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 response in patients,” said Dr. Bhatia, who also is the co-founder of Glympse Bio. “We are delighted to have strong investment partners join in this journey to improve care for patients.”
The financing round was co-led by venture capital firms LS Polaris Innovation Fund and ARCH Ventures. In addition, new investors Charles River Ventures, Gilead Sciences, Yonghua Capital, and Inevitable Ventures contributed to the round, and were joined by existing investors GreatPoint Ventures, Heritage Provider Network and Rivas Capital. This financing follows an initial $6.6 million seed round in 2015 led by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw at Biocon India Ltd and Theresia Gouw at Aspect Ventures.
Polaris’ Amy Schulman, diagnostics industry veteran Stan Lapidus, and seven-time Forbes’ Midas List recipient Theresia Gouw will join Glympse’s Board of Directors, the company added.
“Glympse has brought together world-class science and people, to achieve a fundamental breakthrough for in vivo sensing and monitoring of diseases involved in fibrosis, immune response, infectious diseases, and a broad range of cancers,” said Schulman, adding, “We were impressed by the company’s commitment to a therapeutic model which will be well aligned with the interests of payors, physicians, and most of all, patients.”
Glympse’s activity sensors are precisely bioengineered to be transported to the site of disease in patients, directly interrogate the biological activity of the diseased tissue, and emit a signal which can be detected noninvasively from the recipient’s urine. Glympse’s activity sensors can be administered in a minimally invasive manner, and the analytical read-out can be selected based on the disease characteristics or market needs for the test. The company’s lead indication targets non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) – a growing pandemic that causes fibrosis and scarring of the liver – believed to afflict more than 100 million people worldwide and over 15 million in the United States alone. The company has signed multiple collaborations in NASH with pharmaceutical companies.
Glympse Bio is pioneering an in vivo sensing technology dedicated to transforming disease monitoring. The company has built a product engine enabling rapid development of tunable and bioengineered activity sensors for multiple indications including fibrosis, cancer, immunology and infectious diseases. The technology has been validated in 10 different diseases using multiple delivery methods and a broad range of analytical readouts. Glympse aims to improve healthcare globally by serving the needs of patients, clinicians, researchers, drug developers, and payors to help advance the science and our understanding of human diseases. The company is based at the Lab Central incubator in Cambridge, MA.
Glympse Bio was spun-out of the laboratory of Dr. Bhatia, M.D. Ph.D., the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Dr. Bhatia is also the Director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences.
Co-Founder Gabriel Kwong, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine. Dr. Kwong has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to the US Frontiers of Engineering, for the NIH’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.
