NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Caribou Biosciences today announced that it has closed an $11 million Series A financing round.
Investors included Fidelity Biosciences, Novartis, Mission Bay Capital, 5 Prime Ventures, and one undisclosed partner. Caribou co-founder and pioneering CRISPR/Cas9 researcher Jennifer Doudna has also joined as an investor, the firm said in a statement.
"This funding will allow us to further accelerate deployment of our advanced genome editing platform, which enables simple, flexible targeting of any site in a given genome, in a number of focus areas including therapeutic research and development, agricultural biotechnology and industrial biotechnology," Caribou CEO Rachel Haurwitz said in a statement.
Berkeley, Calif.-based Caribou is developing a genome editing platform based on an exclusive license to the foundational CRISPR/Cas9 work done in part by Doudna's lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Caribou's intellectual property is also based on work done at the University of Vienna.
Caribou has licensed its IP to Cambridge, Mass.-based Intellia Therapeutics to develop human therapies. Caribou and Atlas Ventures created Intellia in 2014; Intellia closed a $15 million Series A financing round in November.
In January, Caribou inked a deal with Novartis to use its genome editing platform to discover and validate drug targets for the pharma company. Novartis took an undisclosed stake in Caribou's Series A financing as part of that deal.