HAYA Therapeutics secure CHF 18m in seed financing round.
Ahead of the announcement of their successful financing round, we asked HAYA's Co-Founders Samy & Daniel what was in store for them in the coming months!
Since winning >>venture>>, what has HAYA been up to?
Since winning >>venture>>, HAYA has been focusing on advancing our lead development candidate and optimizing our target discovery engine, DiscoverHAYA™. Furthermore, we have been able to secure and close our Series Seed Financing Round.
Congratulations on the investment! What does this mean for your startup in the coming months and years?
HAYA’s vision is to develop precision tissue and cell-selective therapeutics that are safe, effective and accessible for patients suffering with fibrotic diseases and other serious health conditions associated with ageing. Our seed financing will allow us to accelerate our lead therapeutic candidate towards first-in-human clinical trials in addition to further developing and exploiting the power of our target identification engine, DiscoverHAYA™.
In a layman's terms, how can your technology help people suffering from fibrotic diseases?
Fibrosis is essentially a disease caused by changes in cell identity. Our technology allows one to control these cell identity changes in a very organ-selective way, by targeting long non-coding RNAs. This allows us to envisage a new generation of anti-fibrotic therapies that are truly safe, effective, and accessible.
As an early-stage medtech startup, how has Covid impacted the development of your startup?
Initially Covid had an impact on our financing strategy, however, overall, the light this pandemic has shone on both Biotech and RNA-therapeutics in particular has ultimately helped us.
What are you most looking forward to with Haya Therapeutics in the near future?
The speed and potential of our engine to generate a pipeline of lncRNA targeting anti-fibrotics for many tissues, including the lung, has been a particularly exciting highlight during the previous year. We are very excited to exploit this engine and rapidly expand our development candidate pipeline in multiple tissues and indications in the near future.