George Church’s Rejuvenate Bio is turning to social networks to help fund its work on one-time gene therapies targeting chronic diseases and root causes of aging.
Rejuvenate Bio is turning to an unlikely source of capital to bankroll the development of its gene therapy pipeline: everyday people.
The startup is looking beyond the usual investor circles for funding support, opening a crowdfunding campaign to give the broader biotech community an opportunity to invest in the company and secure early equity. “This is a real chance for anyone who wants to be part [of Rejuvenate’s mission] to own a stake,” cofounder George Church said in a LinkedIn post on Friday.
Rejuvenate is running its campaign on Wefunder, an online portal that allows anyone to put as little as $100 into a company they’re interested in supporting, according to the website. More than a million individual investors have joined Wefunder since it opened in 2012.
Rejuvenate’s offering allows backers to hop on for as low as $250, according to its Wefunder campaign page, though certain “perks” are awarded only at higher amounts. Investors who put in at least $1,000, for instance, get access to a database of relevant resources, such as research papers and FDA guidance documents. Greater investments unlock more and more benefits, including participation in twice-yearly strategy calls with management and one-on-one meetings with the founders.
The highest tier, worth $500,000, is available only to the first backer that invests at this level and could mean that their dog’s name would be part of Rejuvenate’s drug name, subject to regulatory and manufacturing constraints.
BioSpace has reached out to Rejuvenate for more detail on these offerings.
Headquartered in San Diego, California, Rejuvenate is a gene therapy startup focused on addressing chronic diseases and targeting the root cause of aging. The biotech has built its business around research done at Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, turning the body into what the company in its Wefunder page called a “living factory that restores its own youthful function.”
This approach, Rejuvenate claimed, has yielded “some of the strongest preclinical results in the field.” In a study in dogs, for instance, an investigational gene therapy reversed cardiac disease, in turn extending the animals’ life by more than two years.
For Rejuvenate, testing in animals goes beyond simply building the evidence base for its candidates. Rather, these experiments play into the biotech’s business model: using animal health partnerships to generate sustainable revenue and royalty streams, which in turn would allow the company to support human programs.
“Success in animals directly accelerates human programs through shared studies, shared data, and shared manufacturing, creating earlier readouts and radical reductions in capital requirements,” the biotech said in its Wefunder page.
This dual-market model is already in motion. Last year, the company filed its reasonable expectation of effectiveness package to the FDA, a submission required for animal drugs. Results from studies of the drug are expected this year, while safety and manufacturing work are ongoing, all building up to a potential approval and launch in 2028. In human health, Rejuvenate expects to complete IND-enabling studies in 2028.
Women’s health biotech Daré Bioscience is similarly conducting a crowdfunded round, seeking to raise $24.3 million via investments as small as $250.
