Aug. 9 Quick Takes: Alltrna raises $109M for unified approach to stop codon diseases

TRNA therapeutics company Alltrna raised $109 million in series B funds from founding investor Flagship Pioneering and other undisclosed investors. The company believes its engineered tRNA therapies — designed to out-compete the cellular machinery that halts mRNA translation into protein at disease-causing premature stop codons, but not at normal stop codons that have evolved to recruit that machinery — could be applied broadly to any disease caused by the same type of stop condon-encoding nonsense mutation, regardless of what gene the mutation is in.

The proceeds will fund development of Alltrna’s platform and advancement of its undisclosed first candidates toward the clinic. The company presented preclinical data this year showing one of its sequence-optimized and chemically modified engineered tRNAs increased expression of a gene with a premature stop codon 10-fold in a transgenic mouse model...