ReAlta secures $40m to advance peptide for newborn brain injury

ReAlta Life Sciences has announced the closing of an oversubscribed $40 million financing, bringing the total capital raised to date to more than $150 million. 

The company will use the proceeds to advance pegtarazimod through key clinical and regulatory milestones as the first potential treatment for Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE).  

Upcoming milestones for this first-in-class programme include completion of the Phase II STAR trial in HIE (currently underway at 13 sites across the United States), the study’s top-line data readout, and an End-of-Phase II meeting with the FDA. 

Howard Berman, Chief Executive Officer, said: “Every year, thousands of newborns suffer devastating brain injury from HIE with no approved drug therapy to offer them. Rarely in a career does one have the opportunity to work on a programme with this level of both scientific rigor and human urgency.” 

Pegtarazimod is a 15-amino-acid peptide that uniquely targets both humoral and cellular inflammation. The peptide works by inhibiting complement activation at C1, as well as myeloperoxidase activity and neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation – key mechanisms implicated in the inflammatory cascade underlying a broad range of diseases driven by dysregulated neutrophils and complement activity.  

Pegtarazimod was derived from a mechanistic discovery of the human astrovirus HAstV-1, a virus known to cause non-inflammatory gastroenteritis, which provided a novel scaffold for innate immune modulation. 

It has received FDA Orphan Drug and Fast Track Designations and EMA Orphan Drug Designation for HIE. 

Kia Motesharei, ReAlta’s President and Chief Operating Officer, added: “Our team is creating a new category of medicine for HIE patients where currently no drug therapeutic option is available. The financing enables us to accelerate our work toward realising that vision. The goal here is not to provide incremental improvement, but to fundamentally change how doctors treat newborn babies who develop HIE.”

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