Renagade Therapeutics Cuts 10 Percent of Workforce

Rare Daily Staff

Renagade Therapeutics is laying off 10 percent of its staff in order to speed the path to filing an application to begin a human clinical trial, the company told Fierce Biotech in a statement.

Unlike many recent downsizings by companies dealing with a cash crunch, Renagade’s cuts come six months after it launched in May with $300 million in a series A financing, the third largest private financing so far in 2023. And it is not the only cash rich biotech making cuts and focusing on near term candidates. Recent downsizings were reported for Elevate Bio, which raised $400 million in May, and Crispr Therapeutics, which recently won approval for its gene editing therapy in the UK.

Renagade is seeking to expand the utility of RNA therapeutics by delivering them anywhere in the body that they are needed. The company has built what it says is a comprehensive and complementary platform that combines its proprietary delivery technologies, including novel lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), with a broad array of coding, editing, and gene insertion tools, in an all-RNA system to address limitations in RNA therapeutics by enabling the delivery of RNA medicines to previously inaccessible tissues and cells in the body, substantially expanding the potential addressable disease market.

Renagade has an established joint venture with Orna Therapeutics to combine Renagade’s delivery platform with Orna’s circular RNA technology. Subsequently, Orna entered into a collaboration with Merck that includes technologies developed under the Orna/Renagade joint venture.