Watertown, Mass. — LifeMine Therapeutics Inc. has raised $263 million to accelerate clinical development of its lead drug candidate LIFE-001 and advance its pipeline of transplantation and immunology therapies.
The financing includes an oversubscribed $188 million Series E round led by Milky Way Investments and a previously completed $75 million Series D round. New investors include Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier and RA Capital Management, while existing backers include GV, LoLa Capital Partners, GlaxoSmithKline, Invus and ARCH Venture Partners.
LifeMine, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, is developing LIFE-001 as a long-acting injectable calcineurin activation inhibitor designed to prevent organ transplant rejection while reducing toxicities associated with existing calcineurin inhibitors such as cyclosporin, voclosporin and tacrolimus.
The drug is currently being evaluated in a Phase 1 single and multiple ascending dose study involving more than 120 adults. LifeMine said no clinically meaningful renal, metabolic or cardiovascular safety signals have been observed to date.
“More than 1.6 million people worldwide are living with a transplanted organ, yet physicians continue to rely on calcineurin inhibitors that have remained largely unchanged for more than three decades despite their well-recognized toxicities,” said Gregory Verdine, Ph.D., Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of LifeMine.
Verdine said LIFE-001 is designed to directly inhibit calcineurin activation without relying on intermediary immunophilin proteins, potentially allowing the drug to retain the effectiveness of calcineurin inhibition while improving safety, tolerability and dosing convenience.
LifeMine plans to begin a Phase 2 kidney transplant study and a Phase 1b islet cell transplant study in early 2027. Proceeds from the financing will support those studies and continued development of the company’s broader transplantation and immunology pipeline.
“Calcineurin inhibition remains the gold standard for preventing organ rejection, but today’s therapies come with substantial toxicities that can compromise long-term patient outcomes because transplant recipients typically remain on these medicines for life,” said Andrew Cameron, M.D., Surgeon-in-Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
LifeMine uses its Top-Down Drug Discovery platform, which applies digital genomic search technology to fungi to identify potential precision medicines with new mechanisms of action.
The company also announced the appointment of Yves Zinggeler as Chief Commercial Officer. Zinggeler previously served as Vice President and General Manager of the U.S. Cystic Fibrosis Business Unit at Vertex and has more than two decades of commercial leadership experience.
LifeMine said it has also added executives in transplant clinical development and translational medicine as it prepares LIFE-001 for additional clinical studies and potential commercialization.
