CHINA – Frontera Therapeutics, a Bedford, MA and Suzhou, China-based clinical-stage biotechnology company that seeks to develop novel and best-in-class gene therapy medicines to improve the lives of patients across multiple disease areas, closed a $160m Series B funding round.
Backers included Boyu Capital, Sequoia China, OrbiMed, Creacion Ventures, and other investors.In addition, the company announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application to initiate a first-in-human clinical trial of FT-001, a gene therapy candidate for the treatment of patients with a rare genetic retinal disease that leads to severe vision loss.Led by Yong Dai, Ph.D., founder and CEO, Frontera Therapeutics is a global, fully-integrated, clinical-stage biotechnology company leveraging its novel APEX Technology & Manufacturing platform to develop and manufacture gene therapy candidates across multiple disease areas. The platform is an innovative adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene expression system that aims to optimize both new and clinically validated AAV vectors to enhance the safety and efficacy profiles of gene therapy products. The in-house GMP manufacturing capabilities enables rapid production across the product lifecycle, and efficiently advance AAV therapies from research to clinical development. Frontera’s development pipeline spans not only orphan diseases, but also larger patient markets – including ophthalmology, hematology, neurology and metabolic diseases. 20/07/2022
