New company, BlueRock Therapeutics, launched with $225 million investment

BlueRock Therapeutics, a next-generation regenerative medicine company that plans to develop best-in-class induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) therapies to cure a range of diseases using an industry-leading platform, has been launched by German pharma major Bayer (BAYN: DE) and Versant Ventures.

To be based in Toronto, Canada, BlueRock will be led by a world-class team and has assembled its platform through a series of strategic partnerships with academia and industry.It will also have R&D operations in New York and Boston, USA. The hope is to bring together top Canadian researchers, such as Gordon Keller, director of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) and one of the world’s leading stem-cell experts, and create a commercialization pipeline, according to the local Globe and Mail newspaper.

To enable BlueRock’s platform and pipeline, Bayer and Versant are committing $225 million, representing one of the largest-ever series A financings for a biotech company. The funds are projected to give BlueRock at least four years of runway and will allow the new company to advance a number of programs into the clinic, with an initial focus on cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative disorders.

“Accessing cell based therapies is part of Bayer’s strategy. We are launching this enterprise to develop transformative and curative therapies for patients based on the latest stem cell technology,” said Kemal Malik, a member of the board of management of Bayer and responsible for Innovation. “We have partnered with Versant Ventures to build a leading player in this field by securing exclusive access to these breakthrough technologies for BlueRock Therapeutics,” he added.

BlueRock Therapeutics’ platform is enabled by strategic partnerships with a number of leading academic and industry collaborators in the USA, Canada and Japan.

One of BlueRock’s initial programs is to regenerate heart muscle in patients who have had a heart attack (myocardial infarction, MI) or are suffering from chronic heart failure, leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The goal of the program is to restore the electrical and contractile function of injured hearts through remuscularization with pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.

The manufacturing platform at BlueRock will be enabled by a partnership with the Toronto-based CCRM, a leader in developing and commercializing regenerative medicine technologies, and cell and gene therapies. CCRM has developed technologies and expertise to support robust and scalable GMP production of various stem cell types for cellular therapeutics.

Importantly, the basis for the overall approach is iPSC intellectual property (IP) invented by Nobel Prize winner Dr Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and licensed from iPS Academia Japan, which manages iPSC IP. This foundational IP will allow the company to create iPSCs, which will be an important cell source.