Gladstone launches Tenaya with $50M series A round

The Gladstone Institutes said it launched cardiovascular newco Tenaya Therapeutics Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) with a $50 million series A round. Tenaya President JJ Kang told BioCentury that The Column Group contributed about $48 million to the tranched round, while angel investors provided the balance. Kang is also an associate at The Column Group.

Kang said Tenaya is aiming to develop two platforms to treat heart failure. It intends develop gene therapies to regenerate heart muscle through cellular reprogramming. It will also seek to discover small molecule candidates to treat heart failure via multiple disease models. She said both platforms are in discovery stages, and declined to give a timeline for clinical studies...