Armed with a $47M round, Gates-backed Vis­ter­ra aims at a PhI­Ib flu drug study

At the time Vis­ter­ra made a bid ear­ly this year to go pub­lic, the tim­ing was off. The boom of 2014 was long gone and the cur­rent bumper crop of IPOs had yet to de­vel­op. So now they’ve topped up their C round and closed it with $46.7 mil­lion in ven­ture cash — enough to steer their lead pro­gram through a Phase IIb while get­ting an­oth­er ther­a­py through Phase I.

The lead pro­gram is for VIS410, de­signed to fight in­fluen­za A with tech out of MIT that cen­ters on epi­topes com­mon across all strains of a virus. Tar­get­ing that im­mutable spot on the ever-chang­ing flu virus with tech in­sights out of the lab of MIT’s Ram Sasisekha­ran could lead to a durable rem­e­dy for large num­bers of pa­tients.

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