While most biotechs struggle amid a prolonged funding winter, one group is doing just fine. We are not talking about artificial intelligence. Several start-ups working on nucleic acid-based therapies – a sprawling category that includes several flavors of RNA, anti-sense oligonucleotides (ASOs), aptamers (short single stranded oligonucleotides) and gene-edited cell and gene therapies – are raising bigger-than-average rounds. Four of the top five private financings in 2023 have been companies working on RNA, gene editing or manufacturing. ReNAgade Therapeutics and Orbital Therapeutics each pulled in over $250m; this year’s biggest round yet brought ElevateBio, with its suite of gene- and cell-editing tools, more than $400m.
These groups are competing for dominance in a field of medicine whose scope, impact and value is being compared to that of therapeutic antibodies. Nucleic acid-based therapies, which harness genetic material – DNA and RNA – to treat or prevent disease, is “the next set of modalities that will change what medicines look like,” says Amit Munshi, CEO of ReNAgade, drawing a parallel between these therapies today and antibodies in the early 2000s. Antibodies are now worth over $300bn and include two of the top-selling drugs of all time, AbbVie Inc