RTK Group, LLC, an early-stage advisory and investment fund supporting emerging technologies in the biotech and pharmaceutical sector, announced its participation in seed-round capital funding of Unravel Biosciences, Inc. (“Unravel”). Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“We are pleased to support Unravel and help accelerate their path to realizing the clinical potential of their platform technology,” said Neal I. Muni, M.D., MSPH, Managing Director of RTK Group. “Unravel‘s proprietary drug discovery and patient stratification platform brings remarkable innovation to therapeutic areas with high unmet need and has the potential to deliver novel therapeutics targeting CNS orphan diseases like Rett Syndrome.”
Founded in 2021 as a spinout of Harvard’s Wyss Institute, Unravel Biosciences has developed an innovative, unbiased platform that combines ground-truth patient RNA data with in vivo disease model screening to discover and derisk new drug targets for even the most complex diseases. By combining transcriptome data with proprietary maps of human health, Unravel defines patient groups with shared therapeutic response pathways and matches them with compounds that reverse disease. These compounds are then rapidly screened for efficacy and toxicity in CRISPR-engineered tadpole models that enable high-throughput measurement of clinically relevant metrics, including motor function, behavior, and cognition. Seamlessly integrating computational drug and target prediction with in vivo evaluation enables Unravel to quickly identify therapeutically meaningful targets and therapeutics in parallel. Unravel’s target-agnostic approach has resulted in the identification of RVL001, a promising compound targeting Rett Syndrome, as well as RVL002, a novel compound with potential application in CNS disorders, cancer, and metabolic disease.
“I am pleased to partner with Neal and the RTK team and have their support as we accelerate development of RVL001 towards clinical testing in Rett Syndrome,” said Richard Novak, Ph.D., President and CEO of Unravel Biosciences. “Our platform is built upon more than 7 years of science backed by world-renowned researchers at Harvard University, and we are poised to capitalize on fully realizing the value potential in new drug development by efficiently connecting patient-defined drug targets with effective therapeutics.”