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May 19, 2020

NH’s Rallybio raises $145M in Series B round for lead drug candidate

HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER Rallybio’s co-founders (from right to left) are: Martin Mackay, Jeffrey Fryer and Dr. Stephen Uden.
By Natalie Missakian

A biotech founded by a trio of former Alexion executives has raised $145 million in a Series B round and on Tuesday offered the first look at its lead drug — a treatment for a condition that causes uncontrolled bleeding in newborns. 

San Francisco venture capital fund Pivotal bioVenture Partners led the round, one of nearly two dozen investors that participated in the funding.

Rallybio said it plans to use the proceeds in part to advance its portfolio of rare-disease drug candidates, which it unveiled Tuesday, and to launch its first drug, RLYB211, into human testing later this year.

The company recently opened new headquarters in New Haven at 234 Church St. but maintains a facility at UConn’s Technology Incubation Program in Farmington, where the company was born in January 2018.

With the latest and most substantial capital infusion, Rallybio has raised $182 million since Alexion veterans Martin Mackay, Jeffrey Fryer and Stephen Uden, MD started the company shortly after Alexion announced it would relocate its New Haven headquarters to Boston.

The company raised $37 million in a Series A round in April 2018, with investors including Connecticut Innovations, 5am Ventures, Canaan Partners and New Leaf Venture Partners.

Those investors also participated in the latest funding round, along with a majority of Rallybio's 15 employees, Fryer, the company's chief financial officer, said Tuesday morning.

“Not only do we believe in what we’re doing from a day-to-day work perspective, but we’ve also invested in the company as well,” Fryer said. 

Other investors include Viking Global Investors, TPG’s The Rise Fund, F-Prime Capital, funds managed by Tekla Capital Management LLC, Solasta Ventures, Fairview Capital and Mitsui & Co. Global Investment Inc. 

New Haven BIZ sibling publication the Hartford Business Journal reported last month that Rallybio had raised $93 million toward the round, making it one of the most successful fundraisers in UConn TIP’s history. 

While generating attention for attracting a high-profile team of scientists and executives, the company until now has been quiet about which diseases it planned to pursue. 

Uden said Rallybio acquired its lead drug from a small startup in Norway, after a worldwide search for rare disease assets. The drug treats a rare and life-threatening condition known as FNAIT (fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia), which causes a mother to develop antibodies that attack a fetus’ platelets. There is currently no treatment for the disease, which can cause hemorrhaging in utero or shortly after birth. 

Uden said Rallybio’s drug works by a process called antibody-mediated immune suppression. It aims to prevent the condition by identifying mothers at risk and giving them a very low dose of the problematic antibodies. 

“The pregnancy will go completely normally and the baby will be born as if nothing happened,” he said in an interview Tuesday. 

The company plans to launch a clinical trial in Germany in the second half of this year, testing the drug in male volunteers for safety first before administering it to pregnant women. 

CEO Mackay said the lead drug was a perfect fit with the company’s mission to develop transformative therapies for patients with severe and rare disorders.

“We’ve got other drugs in the program and we intend to [use the financing to]  develop those with gusto,” Mackay said. Those include a preclinical treatment for a rare hematologic disease, and three preclinical protein therapeutics to treat rare immuno-inflammatory diseases. 

Mackay said the company also plans to use the latest infusion of capital to  add to its rare-disease team and acquire new assets. He said the company continues to search globally for new drug candidates.

“We want to build a sustainable company and that means building our portfolio,” he said. “So we’re very proactively looking.” 

Contact Natalie Missakian at news@newhavenbiz.com

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