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www.fdanews.com/articles/205204-bayer-invests-in-boston-based-company-spearheading-new-protein-therapeutics

Bayer Invests in Boston-Based Company Spearheading New Protein Therapeutics

November 5, 2021

Bayer is investing in GRO Biosciences, a Boston-based company that is developing protein therapeutics for patients with autoimmune and metabolic diseases.

The company was co-founded by prominent Harvard biologist and geneticist George Church in 2016. Church is known for his contributions in the sequencing of genomes and CRISPR genome editing, and he has founded or advised several biotech companies.

Bayer has invested $25 million in the company, which will go toward developing the platform and manufacturing activities, as well as preclinical and investigational new drug-enabling studies for the company’s pipeline of nonstandard amino acid (NSAA) protein therapeutics.

The pioneering platform developed in Church’s labs is comprised of the first production organisms with modified genomes that enable the production of proteins with NSAAs — protein building blocks that can make protein therapeutics with properties “previously inaccessible to protein engineering,” the Boston-based company said.

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