Celsius Therapeutics (Cambridge, Mass.) launched with a $65 million series A round led by Third Rock Ventures. Also participating were GV, Heritage Provider Network, Casdin Capital, Alexandria Venture Investments and undisclosed other investors.
Celsius aims to discover and develop precision therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and cancer. Its technology applies single-cell genomic sequencing to defined patient population samples and uses computational machine-learning algorithms along with big data sets to distinguish the specific cells that play a key role in disease and identify which genes trigger their malfunction (see BioCentury, May 15).
Celsius co-founder and President Christoph Lengauer told BioCentury that the series A funding should provide enough runway to establish preclinical proof of concept to determine which programs to bring into clinic. He said the company does not yet have a timeline for when it will begin clinical testing. Lengauer is also a partner at Third Rock.
Celsius has a non-exclusive license to single-cell technologies plus an exclusive license to early stage programs from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.