Cellarity Announces Close of $121 Million Series C Financing

SOMERVILLE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cellarity, a life sciences company founded by Flagship Pioneering to transform the way medicines are created, announced today the completion of a $121 million Series C financing, bringing its total funding raised to date to $274 million. In addition to participation by Flagship Pioneering and other Series B investors, four new investors participated, including Kyowa Kirin Co. Ltd. and Hanwha Impact Partners. The proceeds of the financing will be used to grow Cellarity’s talent base, strengthen its platform, and advance its pipeline toward the clinic.

“We welcome our new investors and appreciate the continued support of our current investors,” said Fabrice Chouraqui, PharmD, CEO of Cellarity and a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “By shifting the focus from a single target to the underlying cellular dysfunction, our platform unravels the complexity of disease biology to create medicines never before possible. We have already made significant progress in confirming the unique capability of our platform with the development of compounds that have been validated in vitro and in vivo, including in higher species. With this financing, we plan to advance our pipeline and showcase the immense possibilities of our approach.”

To create medicines, Cellarity looks beyond individual molecular targets and instead focuses on the whole cell. The company uses single-cell technologies to identify cellular drivers during the transition from health to disease and applies proprietary deep learning models to create drugs that reverse disease at the level of the cell. Cellarity has developed unique capabilities to link biology and chemistry with high dimensional, transcriptomic data to design medicines against the cellular signature of the disease. The Cellarity platform provides critical insights into cellular dysfunction and reveals new biology through which we can address a range of diseases, including those which presently lack a known druggable target.

“Cellarity is truly rewriting the rules of drug creation. Disease isn’t driven by one mechanism or protein, so Cellarity has developed the ability to solve disease through the lens of the entire cell,” said Stephen Berenson, Chairperson of Cellarity’s Board of Directors and Managing Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “Since the cell is a fuller representation of disease, the platform is uniquely designed to drive higher translatability and clinical success, creating important new medicines for internal pipeline development as well as with partners.”

About Cellarity

Cellarity’s mission is to fundamentally redesign the way drugs are created. By shifting the focus from a single target to understanding the whole cell, Cellarity unravels complex disease biology to create treatments never before possible. Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2017, Cellarity has developed unique capabilities combining high-resolution data, single-cell technologies, and machine learning to unravel complex disease biology and purposefully design breakthrough medicines. As Cellarity’s medicines are created against many drivers of cellular disease instead of a single target, their approach is designed to drive higher clinical translatability and success and is applicable to a vast array of disease areas. The company currently has programs ongoing in several disease areas including those in metabolic disease, hematology, and immuno-oncology. For more info, visit www.cellarity.com.

About Flagship Pioneering

Flagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category bioplatform companies to transform human health and sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has, through its Flagship Labs unit, applied its unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in more than $100 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship has deployed over $2.9 billion in capital toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than $19 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 41 transformative companies, including Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Foghorn Therapeutics (NASDAQ: FHTX), Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Omega Therapeutics (NASDAQ: OMGA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Sana Biotechnology (NASDAQ: SANA), and Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB).

Jessica Yingling, Ph.D., press@cellarity.com