Ring Therapeutics Raises $86.5 Million in Series C Funding

Rare Daily Staff

Ring Therapeutics, a company founded by Flagship Pioneering to address the limits of gene therapy with its commensal virome platform, raised $86.5 million in series C funding.

Investors included Alexandria Venture Investments, Altitude Life Science Ventures, CJ Investment, Flagship Pioneering, Invus, Kyowa Kirin, Partners Investment, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, UPMC Enterprises, and others including all of Ring’s existing institutional shareholders.

A major barrier of current virus-delivered therapies is the inability to repeatedly dose. The generation of antibodies against treatment results in a robust immune response to any subsequent exposure. The commensal virome is ubiquitous within the human body and does not trigger any significant immune reactions. Ring said its AnelloVector and AnelloLP therapeutics have the potential to treat patients with pre-existing immunologic barriers and/or those requiring redosing.

Commensal anelloviruses have co-habited and co-evolved with humans over millions of years, yet they have remained largely understudied and untapped. Ring has developed the world’s first and only platform, the Anellogy platform, to discover and harness the unique characteristics of these viruses as programmable medicines capable of delivering a wide array of payloads including DNA and RNA in a highly-tropic, redosable manner. Through its Anellogy platform, Ring has developed the largest anellovirus database to date, having sequenced and identified over 5,000 anelloviruses from human samples. Ring has already begun harnessing this expansive diversity, which offers tremendous optionality with respect to tissue- and cellular-level tropism, vectorization, in vitro assembly, and paradigm-shifting manufacturing modularity.

“This raise underlines our goal to progress the potentially transformative therapeutics from our Anellogy platform towards the patients that need them,” said Tuyen Ong, CEO of Ring and CEO-partner at Flagship Pioneering. “With the recent appointment of our first CMO, Christopher Wright, coupled with our extensive portfolio of published preclinical studies showcasing expansive anellovirus diversity, immune evasion, tissue-specific tropism and in vitro particle synthesis, we are poised to launch our anellovirus-based therapies toward the clinic.”

Photo: Tuyen Ong, CEO of Ring and CEO-partner at Flagship Pioneering