RhyGaze AG, based in Basel, Switzerland and Philadelphia, Pa., USA, have announced a Series A financing of USD $86 million for their company, aimed to advance novel gene therapy for optogenetic vision restoration in diseases causing blindness. The investment round was led by GV (Google Ventures), Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital and founding investors BioGeneration Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund. The company had previously received CHF 10 million seed round in July in 2024, a spin-out from the Basel based IOB (Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology). The company proposes a transformative approach with cone optogenetics, “which has the potential to revolutionize vision restoration for patients suffering from blindness.”
According to the company, cones are the retinal cells responsible for high acuity vision and can lose their sensitivity to light in a range of diseases. Their gene therapy solution are proposed to deliver a new light-sensor gene specifically to cone cells that have lost light sensitivity, repairing their ability to detect light. RhyGaze was founded on intellectual property exclusively licensed to the company by the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel and the funding will advance their lead clinical candidate, a novel gene therapy for optogenetic vision restoration. The investment is to support formal pharmacology and toxicology testing, a non-interventional, observational study to assess potential clinical endpoints in patient groups eligible for the therapy and a first-in-human clinical trial to test the safety, tolerability and potential efficacy of the lead candidate.
Figure 1: Scientific founders of RyzGaze include Charles Gubser (left) at IOB as Chief Operating Officer in 2023 and a co-director of the institute in 2024. He received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado in chemistry and mathematics and a PhD from Cambridge University in Biochemistry and has spent the last 20 years at Novartis. Botond Roska (centre) is founding Director and Senior Group Leader at IOB and a Professor at University of Basel, Switzerland. He earned his MD in 1995 at the Semmelweis University of Medicine, Budapest, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. He was then a Harvard Society Fellow at Harvard University and Medical School. Bence György (right) is a Group Leader at IOB and an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel. He earned his MD in 2009 from Semmelweis University in Budapest, where he also completed his PhD in Molecular Genetics. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined IOB in 2018.
Following the announcement, Dr. Roska, stated that, “this program exemplifies a key goal of IOB: combining our deep understanding of retinal biology and vision with breakthrough technologies to develop novel therapies for vision loss.” In addition, Dr. Katherine High, CEO of RhyGaze and formerly co-founder, President and Head of R&D at Spark Therapeutics stated that, “I look forward to partnering with colleagues at IOB to bring this novel gene therapy to patients, and I am excited about the team we are assembling to pursue this important goal. RhyGaze will determine over the next few years whether the compelling data generated at IOB can translate to clinical outcomes. If that is true, this innovation will have a world-wide impact in improved therapeutics for blindness.”