It's not de­vel­op­ing drugs that bind to RNA, or mor­ph­ing RNA in­to a ther­a­peu­tic — this Cam­bridge start­up has scored $63M to work on RNA-mod­i­fy­ing pro­teins

First came the con­cept of epi­ge­net­ics, the study of chem­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tions made to the blue­print of life — DNA — to switch genes on or off. Then, sci­en­tists re­al­ized DNA’s cousin RNA could al­so be sub­ject to such chem­i­cal ma­nip­u­la­tion, and the field of “epi­tran­scrip­tomics” was born in the last decade.

As re­searchers found that chem­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tions across a cell’s RNA were seem­ing­ly dis­tort­ed in some can­cers, a trio of biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies spawned: Storm Ther­a­peu­tics, Ac­cent Ther­a­peu­tics and Gotham Ther­a­peu­tics. On Thurs­day, 2017-found­ed Ac­cent raised $63 mil­lion in a Se­ries B round, led by EcoR1 Cap­i­tal.

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