Hopewell Gets up to $25 Million in Seed Financing to Advance Next Gen LNPs

Rare Daily Staff

Hopewell Therapeutics, a biotechnology company said it raised up to $25 million in seed financing of up to $25 million to support its lipid nanoparticle platform to deliver genomic medicines to cells beyond the liver.

Mass Ave Capital, 5Y Capital, HIKE Capital, BOPU Capital, IMO Capital, and WS Investments participated in the seed financing. The company said it had conducted the financing across multiple tranches with a majority of funds received to date in addition to further commitments from existing investors.

Hopewell was founded in 2021 by its Scientific Founder Qiaobing Xu, professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University and Chief Technology Officer at Hopewell. It is by Louis Brenner, an experienced biotech industry executive, who serves as the president and CEO.

Hopewell holds exclusive licenses to its ttLNP intellectual property estate from Tufts University for use in a broad field of clinical and commercial applications and has established multiple research relationships with leading industry partners.

“Hopewell Therapeutics seeks to redefine the non-viral delivery space for novel genomic medicines by designing systemically-administered LNPs to specifically target extrahepatic tissues and cells throughout the body,” said Brenner. “The groundbreaking research and intellectual property in LNP design and delivery established by Professor Xu over the last decade provide a solid foundation for Hopewell to develop our own internal pipeline, initially targeting diseases of the lung, while concurrently exploring the potential of our ttLNP platform for patients with unmet needs in oncology, infectious diseases, rare genetic diseases, and neurological disorders.”

Hopewell’s ttLNPs have been shown to deliver a variety of high impact genomic cargoes, including mRNA, siRNA, DNA, gene editing, and gene-writing apparatus, to organs, tissues, and cells throughout the body, with the potential to impact multiple areas of medicine. The company is developing its proprietary chemistry to create ionizable lipids that can overcome the drug delivery limitations of current LNP approaches in terms of organ and tissue targeting, biocompatibility, and sustained expression with repeat dosing.

Research conducted by Hopewell and industry partners in progressive animal models, including non-human primates, have demonstrated high translatability for systemic delivery to targeted tissues across species.

Hopewell intends to focus its initial internal pipeline efforts on developing therapeutics for diseases of the lung, having recently demonstrated high transfection efficiency for systemic delivery to multiple epithelial cell types in the lung alveoli in multiple species. Results from multiple studies of systemic delivery of Hopewell’s LNPs have shown first-ever high transfection of genetic cargoes in the basal epithelial cells of the lung and trachea. Reaching these pulmonary progenitor cells with genomic medicines may unlock the potential to treat a variety of challenging lung diseases.