Typewriter Therapeutics Debuts With $56M for Gene Insertion
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Typewriter Therapeutics has come out of stealth with $56 million in Series A financing led by AN Venture Partners and RA Capital Management, with ANRI, Gemseki and the SBI US Gateway Fund also participating.
The company keeps research facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Tokyo, and it is working on genetic medicines meant to be safe, durable and re-dosable for patients with cancer, autoimmune conditions and severe genetic diseases.
The science rests on something borrowed from nature. Typewriter’s Target-Primed Reverse Transcription platform, or TPRT, is built on the R2 retrotransposon, a gene-insertion system identified by the company’s academic co-founders. The therapy has two RNA parts: a payload mRNA that makes the R2 protein, and a second RNA carrying the therapeutic gene, flanked by sequences that recruit that protein. Inside the cell the two assemble into an active complex, which writes the gene into a specific target site. The R2 machinery then breaks down along with the mRNA, leaving only the inserted gene where it was meant to go. Delivery is by lipid nanoparticle.
Two indications come first: in vivo CAR T and genetic liver diseases. The first non-human primate studies are planned for late 2026.
Alongside the financing, Typewriter named Matthew Stanton as Chief Executive Officer and Leanne Peiser as Chief Scientific Officer, and added former Pfizer research chief Mikael Dolsten to its board as an independent director. Stanley R. Riddell of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center joined the Scientific Advisory Board. Board chair Ken Horne of AN Venture Partners and Laura Tadvalkar of RA Capital also sit on the board.
Stanton arrives from Raven, RA Capital’s healthcare incubator, where he was a Venture Partner. Before that he spent seven years at Generation Bio as Chief Technology Officer and then Chief Scientific Officer, and earlier led chemistry at Moderna Therapeutics, where his team identified the proprietary lipid nanoparticles used in vaccine development. Peiser brings more than 20 years of research leadership across biotech and pharma, most recently as a senior scientific lead on the CAR T portfolio at Bristol Myers Squibb.
The rest of the management team includes Jun Zhou, founder and Vice President of Discovery and Global Operations, Ari Friedland, Vice President of Research, and Mayu Yoshikawa, President of Typewriter Japan.
Founded in February 2022, the company builds on transposon research by Professor Emeritus Haruhiko Fujiwara of the University of Tokyo, and it describes its aim as carrying Japan-originated technology onto the global stage.
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