Founded in 2021, Rona Therapeutics is dedicated to discovering, establishing innovative and disruptive RNA therapeutics with the proprietary platform to enable medicines with more specific, stable, and prolonged effects.
Rona Therapeutics (Chinese: 大睿生物), a platform start-up dedicated to the discovery, development, and manufacturing of RNA therapeutics, announced recently that it had closed a USD 33 million Series A financing round to develop the proprietary delivery platform and initiate the therapeutics pipeline.
The investors of this round include Lilly Asia Ventures, CMB International, Platanus, Fontus Capital, and Lanting Capital.
Rona Therapeutics aims to develop modular and programmable modalities that target the disease areas across metabolic, neurology, ophthalmology, and oncology via different proprietary delivery systems. Its cutting-edge R&D facility, still under construction, is expected to enhance the capacity of nucleic acid synthesis, oligonucleotide chemical modification, and technology-driven nucleic acid manufacture, to ultimately harness the potential of powerful RNA therapeutics.
"The ability to impact at RNA level will lead to a transformative wave of innovative medicines development in our era," said Stella Shi, CEO and co-founder of Rona Therapeutics. "Our company’s vision is to turn this powerful technology into therapeutics applications to improve the life quality of patients."
According to open sources, Stella holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Fudan University. She was responsible for the product pipeline strategy of oncology in Roche Asia Pacific. She is also an executive director of Eli Lilly Asia Fund.
"With decades-long exploratory work to decode nucleic acid therapeutics, Rona has the potential to become a leader in RNA medicines to discover and develop transformative therapeutics," said Dr. Roberto Guerciolini, scientific advisor of Rona Therapeutics.
The main competitors of Rona Therapeutics include Sirnamics (Chinese: 圣诺制药), Ribo Life Science (Chinese: 瑞博生物), Ractigen Therapeutics (Chinese: 中美瑞康).