RhyGaze announces $86 million in Series A financing for optogenetic vision restoration therapy candidate

Funding will aid further development of RhyGaze’s lead clinical candidate, a novel gene therapy for optogenetic vision restoration. Image credit: ©kittyfly – stock.adobe.com

RhyGaze, a biotechnology company based in Basel, Switzerland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, announced it has secured Series A financing of $86 million. Financing was led by Google Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital and founding investors BioGeneration Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund.

The funding will aid the further development of RhyGaze’s lead clinical candidate, a novel gene therapy for optogenetic vision restoration in diseases causing blindness. It will also support activities like formal pharmacology and toxicology testing; a non-interventional, observational study to assess potential clinical endpoints in patient groups eligible for the therapy; and a first-in-human clinical trial to test the safety, tolerability and potential efficacy of the lead candidate.

RhyGaze was co-founded by Botond Roska, MD, PhD, who is also a founding director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB).

“This programme exemplifies a key goal of IOB: combining our deep understanding of retinal biology and vision with breakthrough technologies to develop novel therapies for vision loss,” Dr Roska said.

Other researchers involved in development and testing of the therapy said they look forward to the next steps in the programme. Bence Gyorgy, a group leader at the IOB and RhyGaze scientific co-founder, said, “We are excited to see this programme moving forward because it uniquely presents the opportunity to restore high-resolution vision in blind patients.”

Katherine High, CEO of RhyGaze, sees collaboration with IOB as a valuable opportunity to reach the goals of the therapy. She said, “I look forward to partnering with colleagues at IOB to bring this novel gene therapy to patients, and I am excited about the team we are assembling to pursue this important goal. RhyGaze will determine over the next few years whether the compelling data generated at IOB can translate to clinical outcomes. If that is true, this innovation will have a worldwide impact in improved therapeutics for blindness.”

Reference:

1. Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel Spinout RhyGaze Closes USD 86 Million Series A Round to Further Novel Gene Therapy for Vision Restoration. Businesswire. Accessed January 13, 2025. Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel Spinout RhyGaze Closes USD 86 Million Series A Round to Further Novel Gene Therapy for Vision Restoration | Business Wire