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Creyon Bio Launches with $40 Million to Engineer Medicines on Demand for All

March 8, 2022

Creyon Bio, a drug development company engineering RNA-based medicines and their components with predictable safety and efficacy profiles, launched with $40 million in seed and series A funding with the goal of making precision medicines on demand a real possibility for populations ranging from one patient to millions.

Photo: Chris Hart, co-founder, CEO and president of Creyon Bio

Creyon Bio creates proprietary, purpose-built datasets that inform machine learning models, rapidly identifying the design rules and engineering principles for safe and effective OBMs (oligonucleotide-based medicines).

“At Creyon Bio, we have built the company from the ground up to engineer OBMs, rejecting the idea that they need to be discovered through trial-and-error screening. Our mission is to design and offer predictably safe and effective options for patients with any disease amenable to OBM therapies,” said Chris Hart, co-founder, CEO and president of Creyon Bio. “No matter how rare or common their condition, no matter the size of the patient population, we believe that the Creyon Platform is creating a fast, efficient, and equitable path to engineering new medicines for patients.”

Knowledge and understanding of the genetic and molecular causes of disease are rapidly expanding. Creyon Bio says OBMs are potentially ideal for precision medicine because they directly target these genetic and molecular causes. Creating new OBM therapeutics has been slow and expensive. The full potential of this class of drugs has yet to be realized, both for rare and common diseases. As the diagnostic odyssey ends for more and more patients, Creyon Bio is working to ensure novel OBM therapeutics are rapidly available.

The company uses advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence along with optimal purpose-built datasets to connect foundational biophysical properties of OBM chemistry and sequence with accurate predictive models of safety and efficacy. Creyon Bio says its purpose-built datasets are orders-of-magnitude more efficient than using retrospective or ad-hoc screening data for building predictive models. This allows the company to develop models to engineer optimal OBMs across a broad range of molecular modalities from single-stranded antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) that reduce gene expression levels or change splicing events, to small interfering RNA (siRNA), to DNA and RNA editing systems, to even targeting aptamers, creating unprecedented efficiency that will change how precision medicines are created for patients.

“The Creyon Platform ultimately allows us to create safe and effective OBMs with exceptional efficiency, building a world where there is no gap between diagnosis and treatment,” said Swagatam Mukhopadhyay, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Creyon Bio.

DCVC Bio and Lux Capital led the seed and series A financings with participation by Casdin Capital, Alexandria Venture Investments, and BioBrit. The funding will support continued optimization of the Creyon Platform, expanding the team, and laying the foundations for a diverse internal pipeline.

In addition to Hart and Mukhopadhyay, Creyon’s Board of Directors includes Kiersten Stead of DCVC Bio, Zavain Dar of Lux Capital, and Dennis Langer, an independent board member.

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