RheumaGen Secures $15 Million for HLA Gene-Editing Therapies

RheumaGen, Inc., a biotechnology company specializing in cell and gene therapies, has recently secured $15 million in Series A financing. This funding round was co-led by SPRIM Global Investments and William Taylor Nominees. The primary purpose of this financing is to support the Phase I clinical trial of RheumaGen’s lead program, RG0401, which is designed to treat treatment-resistant or refractory rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

RheumaGen focuses on editing the human leukocyte antigen (HLA), often referred to as the “immune gene,” to develop one-time, curative cell and gene therapies for major autoimmune diseases. The company’s approach aims to prevent the immune system from attacking healthy cells, thereby addressing the root cause of these diseases.

Richard Freed, CEO and Co-Founder of RheumaGen, emphasized the company’s mission to provide cures and remission for individuals suffering from autoimmune diseases. “We founded RheumaGen to relieve the burden that individuals suffering from autoimmune diseases have carried for so long. We are not interested in incremental improvements. We seek cures and remission,” he stated.

The lead program, RG0401, targets 10-20% of RA patients who are refractory or treatment-resistant and suffer substantial unmet need. By making a precision edit to a DNA marker(s) of the HLA gene, RG0401 is designed to make a patient’s HLA molecules mirror those of a person resistant to RA, while maintaining the rest of the immune system as normal. This therapy changes harmful HLA alleles to healthy ones and prevents T cells from activating chronic autoimmune responses, thereby halting not only cell and tissue degradation but also the entire disease process.

Prof. George Schett, M.D., Vice President of Research and Head of the Department of Internal Medicine 3 at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, and a member of RheumaGen’s Scientific Advisory Board, highlighted the potential of RheumaGen’s approach. “RheumaGen’s approach is exciting because it holds the potential for a single intervention to permanently alter the course of autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. This way of thinking could be very disruptive in the market, because it solves a critical unmet need, particularly for those treatment-resistant patients who are suffering the most.”

Tassos Konstantinou, Managing Director, Life Sciences, at SPRIM Global Investments, expressed confidence in RheumaGen’s future growth. “We are thrilled to have co-led this financing alongside this strong group of experienced investors. We are confident in RheumaGen’s future growth, powered by their promising CGT technology and decades of immunology, histocompatibility and clinical expertise across the team, and we look forward to supporting the company as they advance their pipeline.”

RheumaGen is currently conducting IND-enabling studies for RG0401 and plans to begin the Phase I clinical trial in 2026. The company’s vision is to cure patients suffering from autoimmune diseases by developing a pipeline of life-changing treatments for autoimmunity.

RheumaGen was co-founded by Dr. Brian Freed, the company’s Chief Science Officer, who is a professor of medicine and immunology at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, and who founded CU Anschutz’s ClinImmune, one of the largest nonprofit clinical laboratories in the U.S.

The company is headquartered in Aurora, Colorado, and is committed to advancing a new class of therapeutics to cure major autoimmune diseases. With this funding, RheumaGen is poised to make significant strides in the development of its lead program and in fulfilling its mission to provide transformative treatments for autoimmune diseases.

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