San Diego’s Arcturus Therapeutics, founded earlier this year to advance RNA interference (RNAi) technology, says it has secured $5 million in a Series A round raised entirely from individual investors in the United States and abroad.
Pad Chivukula, a co-founder, COO, and chief scientific officer, writes in an e-mail that raising that much from private investors (with 90 percent of the seed investors returning) “is almost impossible these days.” Arcturus raised its seed funding in June, and the latest round brings the cumulative total to $6.3 million.
With the new funding, Chivukula says Arcturus plans to nominate its first clinical candidate in 2014 and recruit key personnel, including a business development executive “from one of the large nucleic acid delivery companies.”
Arcturus is based at the Janssen Labs on Torrey Pines Mesa (which was established to help incubate early stage life sciences startups), but that could change as the company grows. Chivukla says the startup now has 10 employees and, “in the near term we are going to add quite a few employees.”
In a statement yesterday, Arcturus says it anticipates additional revenues will be generated next year from the portfolio of Unlocked Nucleic Acid (UNA) analogs the company acquired two months ago from Marina Biotech of Bothell, WA. Arcturus says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently granted “very broad claims” for the UNA portfolio.
Following decades of development, RNAi has been emerging as one of the most-promising life sciences technology platforms for treating a
