Jersey City, N.J..-based Character Biosciences, which helps development of drugs for polygenic diseases, has closed an oversubscribed $93 million Series B financing round to advance precision therapies to treat degenerative eye diseases, starting with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
The funding was co-led by new investors, Israel’s aMoon and New York-based Luma Group, with participation from Catalio Capital Management, a New York firm with origins in Baltimore, Bausch + Lomb, Jefferson Life Sciences, Innovation Endeavors, S32 and KdT Ventures. Character Bio also has a drug development agreement with Bausch + Lomb.
Camden Partners Spinoff
“Millions of patients suffering from degenerative eye diseases lack effective treatments that delay disease progression,” said co-founder and CEO Cheng Zhang, who has previously headed Strategy and Innovation at Pfizer’s China unit. “By identifying the genetic modifiers of their disease progression, we can develop therapeutics to more precisely target the root causes of disease and improve clinical translation. This funding allows us to advance our lead programs into first-in-human trials, with the goal of bringing new therapies to patients who urgently need them.”
New York-based Catalio was spun out of investment firm Camden Partners in 2020 by Johns Hopkins alumni George Petrocheilos and R. Jacob Vogelstein, the son of famed geneticist Bert. Initially established in Baltimore, the healthcare- and life sciences-focused firm sold a minority stake to investment powerhouse KKR in 2023, and named Kravis, co-founder and co-executive chairman of KKR, as chairman of its board of advisers. Its other big-name investors include Philippe Laffont, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Coatue Management and the father of a classmate of Petrocheilos and Vogelstein, Thoma Bravo, Brevan Howard and Stanley Druckenmiller.
Catalio’s co-founder Petrocheilos has degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and previously ran HealthCor and Global Domain hedge fund. He was only 22 when he made Baltimore Business Journal’s “40 under 40.” Petrocheilos, who serves as Catalio’s managing partner, is among the board of trustees at Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore School for the Arts and Johns Hopkins Center for Financial Economics.
Partnering With Scientists
Vogelstein, who worked with Petrocheilos at Camden, served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University — at both the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Whiting School of Engineering. He earned a BSc. degree in bio-electrical engineering from Brown University and a Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Catalio has backed some startups trying to commercialize cancer research by Vogelstein’s father Bert, a Johns Hopkins alumnus.
Catalio boasts of partnerships with 36 world-renowned scientists, each of whom is also an entrepreneur. Its recent portfolio investments include Perceive Pharma, Aviceda Therapeutics, Alentis Therapeutics, Orantis and Superluminal Medi.
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Character Bio calls itself a “precision medicine” company that develops targeted therapies for progressive diseases caused by issues in multiple genes, starting with ophthalmology. By integrating genomics, deep clinical data, and AI-driven modeling, the company says it identifies disease drivers, helping improve the success rate of drug development. It has started by targeting AMD, which affects one in eight people over 50 and is the leading cause of blindness in older adults worldwide.
“Character is leveraging its multi-omics approach to move beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to deliver first- and best-in-class therapies tailored to specific disease subtypes,” said Jamie Kasuboski, a partner at New York-based Luma Group. “Character’s patient-first approach is unique in its ability to identify those who are most likely to benefit from therapy, and we look forward to seeing the clinical impact of this approach with the use of proceeds from this financing.”
The Series B funding will support for some proof-of-concept studies and the expansion of Character Bio’s pipeline into additional ophthalmic diseases.
