Genetic medicines startup Tome Biosciences is letting go of much of its staff after hitting setbacks following a buzzy launch last December.
In a Massachusetts state regulatory notice, the biotechnology company said 131 employees would lose their jobs by November.
The notice follows a report by Stat last week that the company was struggling financially. In an emailed statement to BioPharma Dive Friday, CEO Rahul Kakkar said Tome had scaled back operations and was in “ongoing confidential conversations with multiple parties.”
The layoffs represent essentially all of the company’s staff; Kakkar told Endpoints News in an interview that Tome had about 130 employees. The company did not return BioPharma Dive’s request for comment Monday on the status of the company’s consideration of strategic options.
Built around research licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tome debuted publicly in December. By that time, the company had raised $213 million from a group of notable investors that included Andreessen Horowitz, Arch Venture Partners and Polaris Partners.
Its goal was to advance gene editing technology that, in theory, could bypass challenges common to existing methods. Dubbed “programmable genomic integration,” Tome’s technology was meant to insert genetic material — even large sequences — anywhere in the genome without causing “off-target” damage.
The company’s pipeline includes research in phenylketonuria and diseases of the immune system, liver and heart.
But Tome’s cash appears to have run low. As Stat reported last week, the company attempted to raise a Series C venture round, but was unsuccessful.
“Despite our clear scientific progress, investor sentiment has shifted dramatically across the gene editing space, particularly for preclinical companies,” Kakkar said in Friday’s emailed statement.
Many other startups have encountered similar funding challenges, particularly as initial public offerings have been difficult to pull off for early-stage companies like Tome. That’s forced some private drugmakers to search instead for pharmaceutical companies interested in an acquisition.
