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ARTICLE | Company News

GRO Biosciences launches with $2.1M seed funding

September 28, 2017 8:22 PM UTC

Synthetic protein newco GRO Biosciences Inc. (Boston, Mass.) raised $2.1 million in a seed round led by Digitalis Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. The newco spun out of Harvard Medical School Professor George Church's lab with a platform of genomically recoded bacteria. Church is a co-founder and heads GRO's scientific advisory board.

The company aims to use its technology to produce therapeutic proteins with enhanced properties, such as increased potency and stability, and improved targeting and delivery into cells and tissues. GRO has developed a recoded strain of bacteria that replaces disulfide-bond-forming cysteine amino acid residues with selenocysteine, a naturally occurring amino acid that forms more stable diselenide bonds, which have the potential to extend the half-life of therapeutic proteins in vivo...

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