NEW YORK – Genomic medicine company Moonwalk Biosciences announced on Thursday the completion of $57 million in seed and Series A financing to advance the company's epigenetic discovery platform.
Alpha Wave Global, ARCH Venture Partners, Future Ventures, GV, Khosla Ventures, and YK Bioventures all participated in the funding round.
The early-stage therapeutics company, which has offices in South San Francisco, California, and San Diego, plans to use these funds to further develop its epigenetic profiling and engineering platform and move its pipeline of epigenetics therapeutics closer to the clinic.
Through epigenetic engineering that leverages comprehensive read-and-write technologies and by mapping the epigenome of cellular states across the whole genome at single-cell resolution, Moonwalk hopes to design therapies that reprogram cells to healthy states.
"Epigenetics is the software of the genome," Alex Aravanis, CEO and cofounder of Moonwalk, and former chief technology officer at Illumina, said in a statement. "While changes to the genome are irreversible, edits to the epigenome can be reprogrammed in different ways. Epigenetic changes determine whether genes are turned on or off, and can potentially reverse disease, broadening the therapeutic landscape to find potential cures previously thought impossible."
Other company cofounders include Arash Jamshidi, former senior VP of data sciences at Grail and another Illumina alumnus; Justin Valley, former VP of applications and consumables engineering at Berkeley Lights (now part of PhenomeX); and genome editing pioneer Feng Zhang, a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Jamshidi will serve as chief technology officer of Moonwalk while Valley will be the company's chief operating officer.