NEA, 5AM back a $50M play to steer gene ther­a­pies to the clin­ic at Ak­ou­os — the lat­est start­up in hear­ing

Hear­ing is get­ting to be a trendy R&D top­ic in biotech.

Eight months af­ter putting to­geth­er a $7.5 mil­lion seed round and lin­ing up AAV gene ther­a­py tech­nol­o­gy out of Mass­a­chu­setts Eye and Ear and Lon­za, the start­up Ak­ou­os has come back with a fast $50 mil­lion A round de­signed to get them through their pre­clin­i­cal phase and up to the thresh­old of their first hu­man study.

Ini­tial­ly fo­cused on a rare ge­net­ic mu­ta­tion that leads to deaf­ness in new­borns, Ak­ou­os CEO Man­ny Si­mons tells me that the biotech has its eyes on a line­up of mono­genet­ic ail­ments re­lat­ed to hear­ing. And they’re look­ing to re­store hear­ing with a pipeline of ther­a­pies, even­tu­al­ly ex­pand­ing in­to broad­er caus­es of hear­ing loss for an ag­ing so­ci­ety.

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