Ride Therapeutics has secured a strategic investment commitment of up to $7.3 million from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to advance its Molecular Logistics platform for delivering genetic medicines to the lung.
The funding will support the development of novel non-viral carriers for genetic medicines intended to reach patients with cystic fibrosis.
Ride plans to build on its existing progress with systemic intravenous delivery while also expanding its platform into inhaled delivery.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts- and Cambridge, England-based company is tackling one of the largest challenges in genetic medicine: getting therapeutic cargo to tissues and specific cell types beyond the liver.
Its Molecular Logistics platform creates highly diverse libraries containing millions of nanoparticles with different physical characteristics and biocompatible components.
Ride then tests entire libraries in vivo to determine precisely which tissues and cell types each carrier reaches. Billions of resulting data points are used to train an AI model of delivery and power a generative design system that produces optimized carriers for targeted tissues.
That delivery capability could potentially support multiple therapeutic approaches, including RNA medicines, gene therapy and gene editing.
Ride was launched in 2023 as a spinout of Harvard University and the University of Cambridge based on technology developed in the laboratories of scientific co-founders Professors David Weitz and Tuomas Knowles.
The company initially raised an $8 million seed round.
Ride said it has already screened millions of different carriers and identified promising candidates capable of reaching tissues that have traditionally been difficult to target.
KEY QUOTES:
“The promise of genetic medicines has never been greater but can only be realized by solving the delivery challenge.”
“Our vision is to decode the biological language of delivery through data generation on a scale no one has reached before.”
Sam Cohen, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Ride Therapeutics
