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Tune Therapeutics’ co-founders, from left: Akira Matsuno, chief financial officer; Charles Gersbach; and Fyodor Urnov, who also serves on the startup’s scientific advisory board. (Tune Photos)
Tune Therapeutics, a biotech company with headquarters in Seattle and Durham, N.C., raised $175 million in one of the largest funding rounds for a Seattle-area startup in recent years.
Tune is using a pioneering technology called epigenetic editing to control gene expression without modifying the DNA sequence itself.
The startup recently launched its first clinical trials in New Zealand and Hong Kong where it’s testing an epigenetic treatment for chronic Hepatitis B. The condition afflicts more than 250 million people global and is the leading cause of liver cancer. The new funding will support these studies.
“This is a very, very novel field. You can think of this as kind of the evolution of genetic medicines,” said Akira Matsuno, Tune’s co-founder and chief financial officer.
The approach addresses the fact that many diseases and conditions are not due to the absence or presence of a genetic mutation. Instead, the ailments can be caused by the misregulation of how a gene functions, making too much or too little of a protein.
Tune uses tools from targeted genetics to direct an “effector” to the misbehaving gene. The effector is able to alter the gene’s behavior for a controlled amount of time. Tune’s approach also employs lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology that became commonly used in COVID shots to deliver the vaccine.
“We have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of a lot of the cell and genomic medicine companies that have come along the way over the last 15 years or so,” Matsuno said.
Tune launched in 2020 and has 80 employees, roughly evenly split between its labs in Seattle and Durham.
The startup’s technology is based on research from Duke University that was developed by Tune co-founder Charles Gersbach. Gersbach is also the co-founder and scientific advisor at two other North Carolina biotech companies.
Matsuno was previously the chief financial officer and head of corporate development at Seattle area’s Lyell Immunopharma and served in vice president roles at Juno Therapeutics.
Fyodor Urnov is Tune’s third co-founder and serves on its scientific advisory board. Urnov is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously was an associate director at Seattle’s Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences.
Tune has built a genetic tuning platform that it calls TEMPO, which can be applied to wide-ranging health conditions.
Tune will be enrolling patients in its Hepatitis B clinical trials and delivering treatment through 2025. Given the newness of the technology, Matsuno was unsure of how quickly they would expect to see results. The company also doesn’t know when it will begin testing its therapy in the U.S.
In earlier research, Tune demonstrated that its technology could repress a specific gene in non-human primates and reduce the levels of LDL cholesterol in the animals. A single treatment provided an ongoing reduction that has lasted almost two years.
The company is looking to apply its therapy to liver conditions in addition to Hepatitis B. It’s also exploring the ability to reprogram a cell’s identity, targeting an unhealthy cell and nudging it back to a healthy state through epigenetic editing.
The company has raised more than $200 million in total from investors. The latest Series B round was led by New Enterprise Associates, Yosemite, Regeneron Ventures and Hevolution Foundation.
Launching the clinical trials is “exciting, certainly, for the company,” Matsuno said. “But [I’m] more excited for the patients and the field in general. We hope it’s a step forward.”
Other large funding rounds for health-related startups in the Pacific Northwest include Kestra Medical Technologies, which raised $196 million, Borealis Biosciences, which raised $180 million; and Outpace Bio, which raised $144 million.
