Transine Therapeutics Ltd closes £13.7m seed financing

Transine Therapeutics stressed it will use the proceeds to accelerate its preclinical pipeline of novel therapeutic RNAs (SINEUPs) capable of upregulating protein expression in Central Nervous System and Ophthalmology indications.

Jan Thirkettle, CEO of Transine, said: “Together with our successful seed round announced in June last year we have raised a total of £13.7m in seed funding, putting us in a strong position to rapidly progress our pipeline of novel mRNA-targeted therapeutics and further develop our platform. We have three active programmes and are continuing to assess opportunities to further leverage our unique SINEUP platform.”

Founded by Professor Piero Carninci from University of Milan and Professor Stefano Gustincich from the University of Genoa, pioneers in functional genomics and lncRNA, and based in Cambridge, UK, Transine can boost the expression of almost any chosen target protein by binding precisely to the mRNA that encodes it and thus massively extends the druggable proteome.

SINEs – short interspersed nuclear elements – are long, non-coding RNAs containing repetitive sequences, and they upregulate the translation of specific mRNAs with complementary base sequences, hence SINEUP.