pharmaphorum September 14, 2021
Startup Rome Therapeutics has raised $77 million in second-round financing to help mine sequences of DNA – which were dismissed for years as ‘junk’ – for hidden treasure.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech is focusing specifically on the 60% of DNA sequences that repeat themselves hundreds or thousands of times in the genome, known as the ‘repeatome’, that could contain targets for cancer and autoimmune disorders.
Repeat sequences aren’t involved in expressing proteins so have been generally under-studied by researchers, but there is increasing evidence that some human traits and diseases may be associated with mutations within them.
Most drug discovery programmes target the roughly 2% of the human genome which encodes for protein.
Rome Therapeutics – which officially launched last...
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