The latest biotech to roll out of Third Rock Ventures is working on Fc-based therapeutics it hopes could offer new treatment options to patients with autoimmune disorders like Graves' disease.
Merida Therapeutics was seeded by Third Rock back in 2022, when the biotech’s co-founder and chief scientific officer Dario Gutierrez, Ph.D., was entrepreneur-in-residence at the VC firm. This morning, Third Rock officially unveiled the drug developer, armed with a $121 million series A financing that the firm co-led with Bain Capital Life Sciences and BVF Partners, who were joined by GV and Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Funds.
Those high-profile investors see potential in Merida’s protein engineering platform, which is being used to create Fc therapeutics designed to specifically target pathogenic antibodies and the B cells that produce them.
The company’s lead preclinical program is targeting Graves' disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes the body to produce antibodies that attack the thyroid gland. Earlier in development is an antibody aimed at allergic disease that is designed to neutralize and eliminate IgE antibodies. Merida is also working on a treatment for a chronic inflammatory kidney disease called primary membranous nephropathy.
“At the heart of Merida is understanding the mechanisms behind antibody-driven diseases like Graves’ at the molecular level, and leveraging these insights to develop precision therapeutics that have thus far evaded the field,” Gutierrez said in an April 8 release. “Our highly differentiated approach has the potential to yield best-in-class treatments by going after the root causes of these devastating diseases, which we believe can help patients lead healthier lives.”
Merida CEO Adam Townsend, who joined the company last month after serving as chief operating officer at eye disease biotech Apellis Pharmaceuticals, said the company is “driven by the opportunity to fundamentally transform the treatment of a wide range of severe autoimmune and allergic diseases.”
“For the first time, we have the potential to precisely target the clear pathogenic drivers of an intractable set of diseases with absolute selectivity and a degree of completeness and durability that has not been achievable through any approach to date,” Townsend said the release.