Nuevocor raises US$24m in oversubscribed Series A round to target genetic heart disease

NUEVOCOR, a biotech startup striving to develop gene therapies for cardiomyopathies, has raised US$24 million in an oversubscribed series A round. The round was co-led by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) and EVX Ventures, a biotech venture capital firm founded by the chairman of Esco Group.

Other investors in the round include EDBI, Xora Innovation and Seeds Capital. The US$24 million will be deployed in tranches, typical in a biotech funding, as the startup reaches certain milestones.

Cardiomyopathy is a disease of the heart muscle that makes it harder for a heart to pump blood to the rest of the body. Tan Yann Chong, founding chief executive of Nuevocor, told The Business Times that the startup is focusing on genetic cardiomyopathies caused by "a mutation of a single gene".

"For genetic cardiomyopathies, you can still have one normal functional copy of the gene, while the other gene is mutated. Unfortunately, this can be enough to give you the disease."

This is the case for dilated cardiomyopathy (a type of cardiomyopathy) caused by mutations in the lamin A gene, which will be the focus of Nuevocor's first gene therapy, Dr Tan added. Here, conventional gene replacement therapies - that replaces a faulty gene with a normal one in an attempt to cure the disease - would be ineffective since the dominant mutated gene will still have an effect on the heart.

Nuevocor's therapy aims to modulate the activity of another gene instead, which in turn will suppress the bad effects of the mutated lamin A gene, Dr Tan said.

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Zhang Weiyi, managing director of BIVF Asia, said that Nuevocor is trying to apply a "very innovative and challenging approach" using gene therapy for the treatment of genetically-driven, dilated cardiomyopathies.

"We are excited to see that the company is exploiting the potential of genetic suppressors to change the course of these diseases and hopefully to significantly extend the life span and improve the life quality of dilated cardiomyopathy patients," Dr Zhang said.

Lamin gene mutations are the second leading cause of familial dilated cardiomyopathy, affecting about 60,000 people in the US and the European Union alone. The mutation confers among the worst prognosis of all dilated cardiomyopathy, with increased risk of sudden cardiac death, the startup said.

The current standard of care for dilated cardiomyopathy only serves to delay disease progression, and the only cure is to have a heart transplant, said Dr Tan. "We hope to give patients a new lease of life through our technology."

Nuevocor, which is at a preclinical-stage, aims to use the fresh funds to fund its research for gene therapies that target cardiomyopathy, in order to move it closer to the clinical trials. The company is also developing a platform that enables it to identify similar disease suppressing genes for other genetic cardiomyopathies.

Its platform is based on decades of research on the part of scientific co-founders Colin Stewart and Brian Burke of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star).

"Singapore has made long-term research and development investments to drive health outcomes and economic growth, and to build the local biotech ecosystem. A*Star is proud to have supported our spin-off Nuevocor in translating excellent science from bench to bedside so they can develop more effective gene therapies for hard-to-treat cardiac diseases, for better patient outcomes," said Ng Huck Hui, assistant chief executive of the Biomedical Research Council, A*Star.