USA – Concerto Biosciences, a Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company, raised $23M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Safar Partners with participation from Horizons Ventures and M Ventures. Representatives from Safar Partners and M Ventures will join the company’s board of directors.The company intends to use the funds to advance its first product through first-in-human studies, accelerate its discovery platform, and leverage the platform to expand its line of products in partnership with other companies. Led by Kehe, Ackerman, and Dr. Bernardo Cervantes, Concerto Biosciences is a biotechnology company designing microbial communities that restore deficient microbiomes to treat disease and rebuilds microbial communities in, on, and around us to heal bodies and planet. Products that rebuild microbial communities do not yet exist because no one can map the vast inter-species interaction networks responsible for community behavior. Using kChip data, the company can map interaction networks that reveal a new class of products it calls “ensembles”—combinations of microbes that work in concert to shepherd damaged microbial communities to health. A kChip prototype was invented by Dr. Jared Kehe, Dr. Cheri Ackerman and others at MIT and the Broad Institute and licensed by Concerto after Kehe, Ackerman, and Dr. Bernardo Cervantes cofounded the company in 2020.The company’s first microbial product, “Ensemble No.2” (ENS-002), is designed to rehabilitate the skin microbiome. By taming the pathogenic behaviors of Staphylococcus aureus, ENS-002 may decrease the frequency and severity of eczema flares.02/11/2022
