Stylus Medicine is unsheathing, penning a mission to develop next-gen in vivo genetic medicines with $85 million in hand, co-founder Patrick Hsu, Ph.D., told Fierce Biotech.
“Stylus was founded in a post-platform era, where the market demands clear clinical direction and product relevance,” Hsu wrote in an email to Fierce Biotech. The company still touts a platform, but one that is designed to simplify gene editing tech and overcome current challenges in the field.
To date, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech has raised $85 million, Hsu told Fierce. The figure was initially reported by Endpoints News and accounts for a prior $40 million series A financing and a more recent $45 million series A extension round.
Investors across the two fundraises include RA Capital Management, Khosla Ventures, Chugai Venture Fund, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the Myeloma Investment Fund and Tachyon Ventures.
The 40-person company is led by CEO Emile Nuwaysir, Ph.D., former CEO of Bayer’s cell therapy outfit BlueRock Therapeutics. Nuwaysir is joined by Jason Fontenot, Ph.D., who serves as chief scientific officer and most recently held the same title at Sangamo Therapeutics.
Stylus’ platform is built on three main components: a therapeutic-grade recombinase, a therapeutic payload and targeted LNP delivery, Hsu explained.
Recombinases “offer a unique and elegant solution for precise gene insertion,” said the Arc Institute scientist and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The two nucleic acid products are designed with a length-independent mechanism to allow for large or complex therapeutic payloads, said Hsu, whose research underlies the approach.
“The modular nature of the platform allows a simple replacement of the CAR construct to target new antigens and thus new cancer types and products,” according to Hsu. “Because large payloads are enabled by the recombinase mechanism there is a clear path to adding additional elements to the payload, like armoring with cytokines, resulting in highly potent CAR-T cells.”
Stylus is slated to present preclinical data from a single dose of a CD3-targeted LNP containing a recombinase and a CAR at this year’s American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy annual meeting in New Orleans.
“We think about the entire ‘efficiency budget’ for the process, not a single step,” Hsu said. “The long-term vision is to deliver scalable, off-the-shelf genetic therapies that can be broadly impactful for medicine.”
Stylus’ exit from stealth comes in tandem with two other new biotechs unveiling: ABLi Therapeutics and Intrepid Labs. The new emergences contrast starkly with a surge in layoffs and biotechs closing amid extreme market volatility.