The Harvard spinout had raised $10m in seed funding from investors including Arch Venture Partners, but disappointing animal studies led the company to be wound down.
Ally Therapeutics, a US-based gene therapy developer spun out of Harvard University, has halted operations, Endpoints News reported yesterday.
The spinout shut down “earlier this year” following disappointing results in animal trials.
Founded in 2018, Ally Therapeutics was looking to prevent an immune response to gene therapies. It was based on research from Ying Kai Chan, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of George Church, himself a prolific entrepreneur who has co-founded dozens of spinouts.
Arch Venture Partners led a $10m seed round in July 2019, when Alta Ventures and UCB Ventures, a corporate venture capital arm of biopharmaceutical firm UCB, also took part.
Bob More, managing director of Alta Partners, told Endpoints News: “I really enjoyed the experience and the work with the team at Ally. They did great work and ran some terrific experiments that indicated that the technology we were pursuing was not as robust as we hoped it might be.
“Not every scientific thesis should be taken forward, but I feel very good that we tested the thesis and the science well.”
