NEW YORK – Scipher Medicine said on Thursday that it has completed a Series B financing round led by Northpond Ventures.
Additional investors participating in the round included Alumni Ventures Group and Tachyon Ventures, along with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Granpool Innovative Investments. The firm declined to reveal how much it raised in the Series B round but said it has raised $30 million to date. A previous Series A round raised $10 million.
The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company said it plans to use the money to fund the development and commercialization of PrismRA, a molecular diagnostic test to predict response to anti-tumor necrosis (anti-TNF) therapies in rheumatoid arthritis patients. Scipher, which was founded in 2014 by researchers at Northeastern University, Harvard, and Brigham and Women's Hospital, uses a proprietary approach for discovering RNA signatures, which it applies to predict response to anti-TNF drugs in rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis.
Scipher announced positive results for PrismRA earlier this year and said that the Series B funding will be used to launch a prospective trial to confirm the clinical utility of the test. PrismRA will identify which patients will respond to the drug before treatment is initiated, the company added.
"Scipher's molecular technology platform has the potential to bring precision medicine to autoimmune diseases, which have long suffered from a fail-first treatment approach," Northpond Ventures Founder and CEO Michael Rubin said in a statement. "We've seen how precision medicine has dramatically improved outcomes in oncology, and Northpond is excited to join Scipher Medicine in improving patient outcomes by bringing a targeted individual treatment approach to complex diseases starting with autoimmune disease."