New C-suite hire turns CorriXR into 'Spark Junior' as $20M Series A launches

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Philadelphia Business Journal

CorriXR Therapeutics has embarked on a major investment round in support of its efforts to improve cancer treatment.

The Delaware-based life sciences company, spun out of the ChristianaCare Gene Editing Institute in 2022, has set a $20 million goal for the Series A fundraising, according to founder Dr. Eric Kmiec.

Kmiec, who is also CorriXR's CEO, said the firm is progressing toward its goal in tranches and discussions are underway with "two major venture capital firms." He declined to identify them.

CorriXR launched with $6.5 million in seed funding led by ChristianaCare, Brookhaven Bio and Cortado Ventures. ChristianaCare continued its support of CorriXR earlier this year with a $3.5 million follow-on investment, and CorriXR landed $1 million from the state of Delaware in August.

The state investment was the first under Delaware's Accelerator & Seed Capital Program to reach seven figures. The program, administered by the Division of Small Business, received $60.9 million in federal funding through the U.S. Treasury Department’s State Small Business Credit Initiative, which aims to expand access to capital for startups and early stage businesses.

C.J. Bell, director of the Division of Small Business, said supporting the scale-up of companies like CorriXR is part of the state's blueprint for making Delaware a "Mid-Atlantic hub for innovation."

CorriXR will use the Series A funds to advance its lead program — focused on developing next-generation treatments for solid tumors, particularly head and neck cancer and lung cancer — toward human clinical testing.

“The investments are critical as we complete preclinical studies, scale-up manufacturing, and prepare our investigational new drug submission," Kmiec said.

Kmiec also serves as executive director and chief scientific officer of ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute, which was launched 10 years ago to explore the potential of CRISPR-directed gene editing applications for battling cancer and inherited diseases.

CRISPR, an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a gene-editing technology that allows scientists to precisely cut, correct and modify DNA to treat genetic conditions.

CorriXR was established to commercialize the institute's gene-editing therapies, the most advanced of which targets head and neck cancer and lung cancer. The company's strategy is to use its technology as an adjunct treatment, combining it with standard therapies such as chemotherapy, radiation therapy and immunotherapy to make them more effective and less toxic.

Kmiec served as the company's founding CEO until Deborah Moorad, who spent three years as an adviser at Cortado Ventures, was appointed to the post in late 2023.

Moorad, now Oklahoma's Secretary of Commerce, left the company last December, and Kmiec stepped back into the CEO role.

It's not a job he expects to hold long-term.

"My role is really to continue to expand the development side," Kmiec said. "We are now starting to expand our management team. There will be a new CEO and a CMO and things like that. I'm happy to have been carrying the torch in this marathon, but I'm ready to pass it off to people who can take it to the next level. I will stay on as the company's chief scientific officer."

The company has grown to 15 employees and has a sponsored research agreement with the Gene Editing Institute. It made a key hire in January, naming former Spark Therapeutics executive Jan Case as its chief operating officer.

“She was head of R&D [operation and program management] at Spark for a number of years and was involved in their Luxturna program,” Kmiec said, referring to the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease. "She’s transformed us from a strong R&D group into a true translational research team [moving discoveries from the lab to the patient’s bedside]. She’s also brought on several consultants from Spark. We’re like Spark Junior right now.”

Spark Therapeutics laid off more than 330 employees during the summer as part of a restructuring by parent company Roche, which acquired the Philadelphia company for $4.8 billion in 2019.

CorriXR plans to file its investigational new drug application with the FDA, which would allow it to begin human clinical testing, in the first part of next year. If approved, the company would begin a Phase 1 clinical trial of its gene-editing therapy in patients with head and neck cancer in late 2026 or early 2027.

Kmiec said the therapy is unique because it’s designed to disable the NRF2 gene in solid tumors using a novel CRISPR-directed approach to disrupt the tumor’s drug-resistance mechanisms. Elevated levels of NRF2, over time, have been linked to increased chemotherapy resistance and tumor growth.

CorriXR is "rewriting the rules of cancer treatment" by altering the genetic code of the tumor microenvironment, Kmiec explained, making cancer cells more vulnerable to standard therapies — potentially leading to better outcomes and fewer side effects.

"Our mission is to power down the regulatory genes that control the tumor microenvironment," he said. "By doing so, we prevent the tumor cell from fighting back."

Kmiec said CorriXR is also studying the ability of its approach to disable a second target, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), to treat lung cancer. EGFR is a protein that, when mutated, accelerates tumor growth by continually signaling cancer cells to divide.

CorriXR believes its gene-editing approach can be applied to more than 30 types of squamous cell carcinomas. When combined with existing cancer therapies, it has the potential to improve treatment efficiency at lower doses, expand patient eligibility, and reduce dropout rates due to side effects.