Apertura Gene Therapy Launches with $67M

Apertura Gene Therapy has launched with a Series A financing of up to $67M from Deerfield Management Company to develop genetic medicines. Deerfield Management has also committed additional operational support. Apertura is based at the Cure, Deerfield’s innovation campus in New York City.

Apertura is founded on a pair of platform technologies developed in the labs of Ben Deverman at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School. The company’s platform leverages machine learning and high-throughput assays to engineer novel capsids, gene regulatory elements, such as promoters and enhancers, and payloads to simultaneously enhance multiple functions of gene therapies for greater translational potential.

“While next-generation approaches to gene therapy have largely focused on the innovation of delivery vectors, Apertura has the potential to innovate simultaneously across delivery, expression, and payloads.” said Dave Greenwald, Acting CEO of Apertura and VP, Business Development at Deerfield.

Deverman, Scientific Founder of Apertura, said: “When developing a gene therapy, it has been common to use naturally occurring serotype AAV capsids. The technology we have developed uses proprietary assays and machine learning to design custom AAV capsids that have the chosen characteristics for treating specific diseases, and we believe this approach will result in new and effective gene therapies.”

Apertura has certain exclusive rights to AAV capsids developed in the Deverman Lab at the Broad Institute. A separate sponsored research and licensing agreement with Harvard grants Apertura exclusive access to certain powerful methods of identifying cell type-specific genetic regulatory elements (GREs) developed in the Greenberg Lab at Harvard. (Source: Apertura Gene Therapy Website, 26 April, 2022)