Expands RTK Group’s biopharma investment portfolio into startups developing platform technologies having high potential for disruptive innovation
BOSTON, June 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — RTK Group, LLC, (“RTK Group”), an early-stage advisory and investment fund supporting emerging technologies in the biotech and pharmaceutical sector, today announced its participation in seed-round capital funding of Unravel Biosciences, Inc. (“Unravel”). The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“We are pleased to support Unravel and help accelerate their path to realizing the clinical potential of their platform technology,” said Neal I. Muni, M.D., MSPH, Managing Director of RTK Group. “Unravel’s proprietary drug discovery and patient stratification platform brings remarkable innovation to therapeutic areas with high unmet need and has the potential to deliver novel therapeutics targeting CNS orphan diseases like Rett Syndrome.”
Founded in 2021 as a spinout of Harvard’s Wyss Institute, Unravel Biosciences has developed an innovative, unbiased platform that combines ground-truth patient RNA data with in vivo disease model screening to discover and derisk new drug targets for even the most complex diseases. Combining transcriptome data with proprietary maps of human health, Unravel defines patient groups with shared therapeutic response pathways and matches them with compounds that reverse disease. These compounds are then rapidly screened for efficacy and toxicity in CRISPR-engineered tadpole models that enable high-throughput measurement of clinically relevant metrics, including motor function, behavior, and cognition. Integrating computational drug and target prediction with in vivo evaluation enables Unravel to quickly identify therapeutically meaningful targets and therapeutics in parallel. Unravel’s target-agnostic approach has resulted in the identification of RVL001, a promising compound targeting Rett Syndrome, and RVL002, a novel compound with potential application in CNS disorders, cancer, and metabolic disease.
“I am pleased to partner with Neal and the RTK team and have their support as we accelerate the development of RVL001 towards clinical testing in Rett Syndrome,” said Richard Novak, Ph.D., President, and CEO of Unravel Biosciences. “Our platform is built upon more than 7 years of science-backed by world-renowned researchers at Harvard University, and we are poised to capitalize on fully realizing the value potential in new drug development by efficiently connecting patient-defined drug targets; with effective therapeutics.”
RTK Group is a family-office backed, seed-stage biopharmaceutical advisory and investment fund focused on emerging technologies having a disruptive impact and significant potential to benefit patients. We focus our efforts where we can leverage our unique expertise in company formation and technology development to assist high-performing management teams to realize the full value potential of their technology. For more information, visit www.rtkgrp.com.
Unravel Biosciences is a therapeutics company founded in early 2021 at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, leveraging its proprietary BioNAV™ platform combining drug discovery, patient stratification, and preclinical screening to find treatments for complex diseases impacting the whole body. By combining dynamic transcriptome data with proprietary maps of human health, Unravel identifies similar patient groups based on network signatures and matches them with compounds that reverse disease. Evaluation in the automated SquishyWare™ in vivo screen identifies effective hits that improve clinically relevant metrics and are used to uncover hidden drug targets. Unravel’s target-agnostic approach has resulted in the identification of RVL001, a promising proprietary formulation targeting Rett Syndrome, and the discovery of RVL002, a new small molecule with potential applications in CNS, cancer, and metabolic diseases. For more information, please visit www.unravel.bio.
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SOURCE RTK Group, LLC