Synthetic biology specialist GRO Biosciences started exploring strategic alternatives about six months after raising a series B backed by top venture capital funds, Fierce Biotech has learned.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech conducted a reorganization that included reducing its research staff recently, GRObio confirmed in a statement to Fierce Biotech. The company did not specify the number of employees affected. For a young biotech built on a novel technology platform, research staff members typically make up the bulk of the team.
Several former staffers stopped working at the company in January, a LinkedIn search shows. A co-founder of the firm, principal scientist Benjamin Stranges, Ph.D., was among those departed.
GroBio’s founding CEO Daniel Mandell, Ph.D., and chief scientific officer Christopher Gregg, Ph.D., have also both been removed from the startup's leadership page.
The sudden downturn comes after the company raised more than $90 million from some top biotech VC shops.
The biotech closed a $60.3 million oversubscribed series B round co-led by Atlas Venture and Access Biotechnology in July 2024. Before that, GRObio had secured $25 million from a 2017 series A co-led by Leaps by Bayer and Redmile Group. Those two funds, plus lead seed investors Digitalis Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, also participated in the series B.
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GRObio was born out of the George Church Lab at Harvard University in 2016, with the geneticist and serial entrepreneur listed as a co-founder and scientific advisor.
As its name suggests, the company is focused on GRO, or genomically recoded organisms—which are made with modified genomes—to produce therapeutic proteins based on artificial building blocks called nonstandard amino acids (NSAAs) rather than the 20 naturally occurring amino acids. The goal is for the resulting biologics to possess enhanced properties, such as increased potency and stability, and more targeted delivery into cells and tissues.
The company has developed a lead drug candidate for gout, which is a painful inflammation of joints cause by excess uric acid buildup. Called ProGly-Uricase, the product is based on GRObio’s ProGly platform, which involves using glycan-containing NSAAs to manipulate immune response. The gout program was designed to prevent the body from developing harmful antidrug antibodies against standard uric acid-targeted treatment such as Amgen’s Krystexxa, according to the company’s website.
Proceeds from the series B round in July were supposed to support the program into the clinic as well as to broaden the firm’s pipeline and expand its GRO platform. Now, the company said it's exploring strategic alternatives to advance ProGly-Uricase.
Big-shot academic origin, a star roster of investors and the proximity of the most recent financing render GRObio’s slip into uncertainty even more puzzling. The sudden need to undergo deep changes begs several questions related to investor support and the company’s core technology.
GRObio declined to comment when asked whether investors have pulled out. Atlas Venture did not respond to Fierce Biotech’s request for comment, and Bayer shared GRObio’s same statement.
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As to technology, the company’s GRO platform may carry the risk of a potential intellectual property conflict with another Church Lab spinout—cross-town synthetical biology rival Pearl Bio.
Church and Pearl Bio cofounder Farren Isaacs, Ph.D., from Yale University first described and characterized GROs in a 2013 Science paper by editing the genome in E. coli. Then, in a 2015 Nature article, Church and GROBio cofounders Mandell and Gregg leveraged GROs and computationally redesigned essential enzymes to produce the first proteins that conferred metabolic dependence on NSAAs for survival. Another Nature study published this February led by Isaacs and another Pearl Bio advisor, Jesse Rinehart, Ph.D., described a second-generation GRO that enables encoding of two NSAAs to create multifunctional biologics.
Pearl Bio was launched years behind GRObio in 2021, with Church also on board as a science advisor. On a high level, the two companies are working on the same approach—using GROs to encode synthetic chemistries such as NSAAs to make novel biologics.
But a U.S. patent issued to inventors in June 2023 and subsequently exclusively licensed to Pearl Bio gave the younger company an upper hand. Pearl Bio Chief Operating Officer and Chief Business Officer Amy Cayne Schwartz called the U.S. patent, coded 11,649,446, a “blocking IP.”
The patent protects the use of any GROs for making proteins encoded with any synthetic chemistry, including NSAAs, and it covers any codon or organism with a recoded genome, Pearl's Isaacs explained in an email to Fierce.
“Thus, any commercial effort to make proteins with synthetic chemistries in GROs would need to collaborate or obtain a license from Pearl,” Isaacs said.
That means GRObio would need to license the IP from Pearl if it wishes to advance products based on proteins with synthetic amino acids using a GRO, Schwartz, who has a legal background, told Fierce.
So far, GRObio has not reached out to Pearl for such a deal. If GRObio had done that, Pearl would have been open to discussion, according to Schwartz.
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However, this potential IP conflict was not a new development—the patent was issued in 2023, a year before GRObio’s series B raise. Schwartz said the Pearl team was surprised when GROBio closed that financing round because the IP issue—which is core to both companies’ businesses—is a red flag for any due diligence.
In its statement to Fierce, GRObio said: “It is false to state that investors are pulling out of GRObio due to any potential IP conflict with Pearl Bio.”
“In fact, the board and the Company stand firmly by the broad intellectual property portfolio GRObio has developed related to both its lead asset and its genomically recoded organism (GRO) platform,” the company added. “The team is evaluating multiple options for the development and advancement of its platform and intellectual property.”
Meanwhile, Pearl Bio, which has only raised $4.1 million in seed round according to public record, has attracted Merck & Co. for a collaboration potentially worth up to $1 billion.
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