BRIEF—Esco Ventures launches Carmine Therapeutics

Singapore-based Esco Ventures has announced the launch of Carmine Therapeutics and execution of an exclusive license agreement for the technology developed in the laboratories of Professors Minh Le and Jiahai Shi at the City University of Hong Kong.

Carmine plans to establish a site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to expand in the USA at the end of 2019.

Carmine is developing novel gene therapies that utilize extracellular vesicles (EVs) produced from red blood cells (RBCs).

The foundational work behind this revolutionary platform was published in 2018 in Nature Communications 9:2359.

RBCEVs are homogeneous, 150-nanometer vesicles that are also produced physiologically by RBCs as they age.

To date, Carmine has raised $3.4 million in seed funding, in an oversubscribed round led by Esco Ventures and joined by other investors.