Garuda Therapeutics Launches with $72 Million Series A Financing

Garuda Therapeutics completed a $72 million series A financing to advance development of its off-the-shelf hematopoietic stem cell platform designed to eliminate dependency on donor or patient cells.

Photo: Dhvanit Shah, president and CEO of Garuda Therapeutics

Aisling Capital, Northpond Ventures, and Orbimed led the financing, which also included the participation of Cormorant Asset Management, Ridgeback Capital Investments, Monashee Investment Management, Sectoral Asset Management, National Resilience, Mass General Brigham Ventures, and others.

Garuda’s platform for generating off-the-shelf, self-renewing blood stem cells is designed to provide patients with rapid and broad access to consistent, durable, HLA-matched transgene-free blood stem cell therapies. Currently, patients seeking a blood stem cell transplant, must find a suitable human donor as a source of blood stem cells.

Racial minority and mixed-race patients face greater barriers than white patients in finding suitable blood stem cell matches. Like bone marrow transplants, Garuda’s technology has the potential to address, and possibly cure, more than 70 diseases. It also overcomes many limitations of current practices and could potentially offer treatment options to patients irrespective of their racial background.

“Our technology has the potential to transform blood stem cell transplants, revolutionizing the landscape of medicine,” said Dhvanit Shah, president and CEO of Garuda Therapeutics. “Eliminating the need for donor or patient cells while gaining the ability to exploit stem cell engineering would democratize blood stem cell transplants, ensuring this vital, and often curative, therapy can be made accessible to any bone marrow transplant eligible patient in need.”

Shah, who previously served as principal faculty of Harvard Stem Cell Institute, associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and principal investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, founded the company. Other prominent scientific founders of Garuda include David Scadden and Sean Morrison, who are industry and academic leaders with a strong history of developing transformative medicines and successful company exits.

“The potential of Garuda’s breakthrough platform technology is immense,” said David Scadden, co-director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute and professor of Medicine at Harvard University. “This funding milestone brings us one step closer to delivering life changing cellular therapeutics to patients.”

Author: Rare Daily Staff