Cambridge, MA-based startup Vesigen Therapeutics is laying off staff and “evaluating strategic options,” CEO Paulash Mohsen confirmed to Endpoints News via email Friday afternoon.
Multiple employees posted to LinkedIn this week about being let go from the company, with one employee saying the company’s “journey” has come to “an early conclusion.”
Mohsen said the startup “has not shut down.”
“Yes, like many biotechs facing headwinds in the current financing environment, Vesigen has made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce,” Mohsen said. He said the decision came this week and the company is “evaluating strategic options, including with a variety of parties that are interested in delivery.”
The company says its patented technology can help to deliver intracellular therapeutics to previously undruggable targets.
“Delivery continues to be a significant unmet need for genetic medicines, and we have technology that shows considerable promise in bridging this gap. Our objective continues to be for the technology to succeed and find its way to patients,” he said.
He didn’t immediately answer a question about how many employees were impacted.
The startup emerged in July 2020 with $28.5 million from Leaps by Bayer, Morningside Ventures and Alexandria Real Estate Ventures, among others, and doesn’t appear to have raised another equity financing since then. At the time of the unveiling, co-founding CEO Robert Millman told Endpoints News the Series A would last the company until 2025.
It reeled in a $32 million debt round in early 2023, according to venture data firm PitchBook.
The company is attempting to build out a new generation of non-viral delivery technology for applications across gene editing, RNA and protein-based therapies. It is based on work out of Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, where professor Quan Lu worked on so-called ARMMs, or arrestin domain-containing protein 1 [ARRDC1]-mediated microvesicles.
They’re “distinct from exosomes,” Lu wrote in a Nature Communications publication in 2018. The production is more controlled, and the cargos can be recruited into the vesicle during the manufacturing process instead of after.
“The barrier to being a drug company right now is not technology or targets,” Millman told Endpoints at the time of the Series A. He departed the company about a year later, and Yumanity veteran Mohsen took over as CEO in 2022. “There’s plenty of targets, there’s plenty of technology, but there’s no way of getting the two of those into a patient.”
It is working in four broad therapeutic areas, including ocular diseases, immunology, neurology and blood disorders. In May, the company presented data at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology and the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. It has not yet entered the clinic.