A global syndicate of investors, Bluehill Capital, SOSV, and pi Ventures led a $3.5 million seed funding round for Helex, a therapeutics startup creating a new class of targeted medicines for genetic kidney diseases.
Helex has now raised more than $6 million in funding with this round. According to a press release from Helex, the proceeds will be utilized to advance its platform to create a unique kidney therapeutics portfolio and expedite its lead candidate for Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD).
Helex, a therapeutics company co-founded in 2021 by Poulami Chaudhuri, Rohini Kalvakuntla, and Anirudh Nishtala, is using its proprietary LNP drug delivery and AI-based drug design platforms to develop a new class of targeted medicines for genetic kidney diseases.
By creating programmable, non-viral LNP therapeutics that deliver genetic payloads directly to kidney cells, Helex, which is being cultivated at ASPIRE-BioNEST, University of Hyderabad, hopes to revolutionize the treatment of rare and chronic kidney diseases.
Helex claims that in order to produce, validate, and distribute disease-specific gRNA, its platform is driven by data-driven deep learning modeling using its own genomics data, bioinformatics, and high-throughput sequencing data from gene-edited target cells.
Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD), a progressive inherited disorder that affects over 12 million people worldwide and approximately 5% of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in India, is the focus of Helex’s lead program. With a single-dose, non-viral, gene-editing-based treatment that may stop or considerably slow the progression of the disease, it seeks to change that.
