Quralis, a US-based precision therapeutics developer founded by Harvard University professors, has launched with an undisclosed amount of seed funding from investors including Amgen Ventures, a division of biopharmaceutical developer Amgen. The round included Alexandria Venture Investments, the corporate venturing arm of life science real estate developer Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and MP Healthcare Venture Management, part of Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation, owned in turn by conglomerate Mitsubishi Chemical. Quralis hopes to exploit genetic research to develop therapeutics for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a group of paralysing motor neuron disorders that can leave patients with only two to five years to live. The company’s pipeline consists of treatments for three subtypes of ALS – a first drug aims to restore a dysfunctional cellular waste clearance system that poisons neurons, while a second therapy treats overactive neurons and prevents resulting cell death, and a third approach is meant to remove toxic proteins. Quralis is based on research by Harvard professors Kevin Eggan and Clifford Woolf. Eggan works in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Stem Cell Institute, while Woolf is a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the university-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital. The pair co-founded Quralis alongside Jonathan Fleming, CEO of electrophysiology platform developer Q-State Biosciences, and Kasper Roet, a research fellow at Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute and Medical School who is now chief executive at Quralis.

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