Haya Therapeutics has procured $65m in Series A funding to expedite the clinical development of HTX-001 for treating heart failure.

The financing also aims to support the expansion of its RNA-guided regulatory genome pipeline development engine.

The Series A round was spearheaded by Earlybird Venture Capital and Sofinnova Partners. It also saw contributions from Eli Lilly, +ND Capital, ATHOS, LifeLink Ventures, and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Additional financing came from current investors such as Apollo Health Ventures, BERNINA Bioinvest, and 4see ventures.

Haya plans to use the funds to initiate clinical trials for the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), HTX-001, initially aiming to target non-obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (nHCM).

Concurrently, the company aims to bolster its platform offerings and broaden its disease-modifying therapeutic pipeline, addressing conditions such as obesity, age-related diseases, and pulmonary fibrosis.

Haya Therapeutics CEO and co-founder Samir Ounzain said: “This funding validates our organisation, pioneering approach, and vision for improving the way chronic and complex diseases are treated by creating a new generation of therapies that reprogramme disease-driving cell states into healthy ones.

“We’re excited that Sofinnova Partners, Earlybird, and our syndicate of investors share our vision for the potentially industry-changing nature of our platform as we move beyond traditional approaches by leveraging novel therapeutic targets emerging from the regulatory genome.”

The core of Haya's platform lies in mapping and decoding the "dark genome", the regulatory genome that constitutes 98% of the human genome.

By combining integrated multimodal functional genomics with a proprietary computational stack and machine learning techniques, Haya claims to have created a comprehensive atlas of the regulatory genome.

This platform is said to facilitate RNA-guided therapeutic development, offering scalability and speed.

Haya's approach aims to transcend symptom management by reprogramming cellular disease drivers.

Last September, Eli Lilly teamed up with Haya Therapeutics in a $1bn deal to identify multiple regulatory-genome-derived RNA-based drug targets, as it looks for new targets in obesity.