For $250, you can now own a piece of a George Church gene therapy company.
Yeah, I had to read that twice.
Rejuvenate Bio, the San Diego company spun out of Church’s Harvard lab in 2017, has opened a public equity crowdfund on Wefunder with entry points starting at $250.
This is the same company that pulled in over $10 million in Series A funding from Kendall Capital Partners, KdT Ventures, and Digitalis Ventures, and counts gene therapy pioneer Katherine High as a backer.
Now your dentist can co-invest alongside her.
And this isn’t some random project that George is just “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if anything sticks”. No – this is legit.
RJB-0402 is an AAV-based, liver-directed gene therapy delivering FGF21, currently preclinical, with a lead indication in desmoplakin arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy.
The label expansions look like someone took too much ADHD medication and then locked themselves in their office:
Dilated cardiomyopathy.
Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.
Familial partial lipodystrophy.
GLP-1 non-responsive obesity.
MASH.
One asset, six indications, all riding on FGF21’s pleiotropic effects.
Three years of preclinical safety data in dogs, no reported safety signals, reversal of cardiac disease markers in canine models. No human data yet.
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And check this out. Rejuvenate’s commercial strategy is…interesting.
The company is going through dogs first.
They’re developing gene therapies for canine mitral valve disease in partnership with Phibro Animal Health and for canine osteoarthritis with an undisclosed global animal health partner. Veterinary revenue funds the human IND-enabling work, and dog cardiovascular physiology happens to model human disease closely enough to do double duty.
It also tells you why retail crowdfunding showed up on the menu.
Aging and cardiometabolic gene therapy is a long, expensive road to human proof-of-concept, and FGF21 has chewed up plenty of capital in other hands without a clean approval to show for it. Pfizer and Akero have both been there. Life Biosciences is in Phase 1 with its own epigenetic reprogramming approach. The space is real, and crowded, and patient.
If you’re a retail investor weighing this, the questions are the ones the press release didn’t answer. What’s the valuation. What’s the raise target. When does RJB-0402 file an IND. The Wefunder page presumably has answers. The LinkedIn announcement does not.
Church companies tend to be ambitious, scientifically defensible, and slow.
Make sure to bring a healthy dose of patience to the “invest now” button.
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