John Maraganore, the former CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals turned biotech elder statesman and venture capitalist, is launching a new startup that he hopes can expand upon his previous company’s success.
His new venture, City Therapeutics, launched Tuesday with $135 million from ARCH Venture Partners, Fidelity, Invus, Rock Springs Capital, Regeneron Ventures, and others, he told STAT exclusively. Maraganore is a venture partner at ARCH, and also holds various positions at Atlas Venture, Blackstone Life Sciences, and RTW Investments.
City Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, Mass., is developing new medicines that use RNA interference, or RNAi, to silence genes and halt the production of harmful proteins. That’s a familiar enough story in biotech: Alnylam won regulatory approval of the first RNAi treatment in 2018, and several other such therapies have followed. But City’s next step is delivering treatments to hard-to-reach tissues by using new delivery vehicles and smaller versions of RNA molecules called cleavage inducing tiny RNAs, or “cityRNAs” — hence, the startup’s name.
