Trontinemab

A biotech in Dublin and London wants to jump into the bustling RNAi and brain shuttle fields to create precision medicines for neurodegenerative diseases. The biotech, named Aerska, launched Wednesday with $21 million in seed funding from Age1, Backed VC, Speedinvest and others. Jack O’Meara, a jovial entrepreneur fresh off building a biotech in the RNA liver medicines space, is leading Aerska. He founded the prior startup, which is called Ochre Bio, and eventually forged partnerships with Boehringer Ingelheim and GSK before departing in the fall of 2024 . Six years later, Ochre has a preclinical pipeline in fibrotic diseases, MASH, obesity and sarcopenia. But O’Meara wants to go faster this time and get into the clinic more quickly, though that’s partially a reflection of investors wanting to back asset-focused pipelines rather than broad discovery platforms. Nine months after founding Aerska, O’Meara said the company has collected a relatively ample seed round to advance its candidate, which can then serve as the basis for a Series A. The next goal is clinical proof-of-concept data. The long-term ambition is to create precision medicines using data science for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The data science work is still too early to discuss, O’Meara said, but he noted it could help speed up and improve clinical trials, which can be long and complex when it comes to neurodegenerative diseases. “We’re starting to piece that together, but a lot of the initial work has been: Get the shuttle, get the siRNAs, put them together, make sure they work and move quickly toward the clinic,” O’Meara said. “That’s a feature of the macroenvironment we’re working in. Big discovery platforms are a little bit harder to finance, a little bit out of vogue at the moment.” Aerska is creating RNA interference medicines that it plans to pair up with brain shuttle technology that it in-licenses from external partners, according to O’Meara. The goal is to create antibody-oligonucleotide conjugates, or AOCs, that can get into the brain, durably knock down genes in the brain, and be more targeted than currently available neurological treatments. After his work at Ochre, O’Meara said he began to get excited about brain shuttles, most notably Roche’s trontinemab data in Alzheimer’s and AbbVie’s $1.4 billion acquisition of Aliada Therapeutics last year. “If we could get this elegant, long-acting, highly specific, low cost of goods — all the great things about siRNA — [and] if we get into the brain, we could probably do a lot of good,” he added. O’Meara counts Stuart Milstein, who kick-started the brain delivery work at RNAi pioneer Alnylam, as his co-founder. The leadership team includes head of research Mike Perkinton and head of early development David Coughlan. Perkinton was formerly head of discovery for AstraZeneca’s neuroscience team, and Coughlan was head of translation at Ochre and chief technology officer at Afimmune. O’Meara is building his latest biotech in a vastly different market than when he planted the seeds for Ochre. This time around, venture funding isn’t easy to come by, and discovery platforms are no longer en vogue. But if a drug development startup can get the money it needs, then it’s “the best time ever to start a biotech company,” O’Meara said. His comments echo a commonly held belief that starting a company in a downturn can lead to the best returns. He said the 15-employee startup is attracting talent easily, especially near its labs in London, where multiple pharma giants have started scaling back or pausing investments in recent months. “Even getting our lab set up is a fraction of what we were paying to do the same thing at Ochre,” O’Meara said. Non-human primate “studies are immediately available at a hugely reduced cost from where they were. All of the inputs to doing good science in biotech have dramatically decreased in price. If you can raise the capital, it’s the best time to be building a biotech.” The company also has a corporate office in Dublin, about 50 meters away from where Elan Pharmaceuticals’ offices used to be. (Elan was acquired by Perrigo for $8.6 billion in 2013.) Aerska’s name traces back to a Gaelic term that means “in the shelter of one another, people survive,” O’Meara said. “Talking about big dreams, that’s an interesting neurodegenerative Irish biotech story that we find some inspiration from,” he said of Elan. One of Aerska’s investors, Backed VC, is betting the startup can become a large neuro drugmaker like Elan was. “We’re trying to avoid the $500 [million] to $1 billion outcomes,” Backed VC partner and Aerska board member Alex Brunicki said in an interview. “We’re really looking for companies that could become commercially independent biopharma companies and become truly, very, very large, whether that’s $10 [billion] to $50 billion companies. “The neuro space,” he said, “really is that.”