By Dr. Robert Ang, President & CEO
As the year winds down, you can’t help but look back on the year past. What a wild ride it has been for biotech in general.
No-one has been spared – investors, start-ups, small-cap companies, and even mature revenue-generating companies have all been impacted, alongside support industries such as CDMOs, CROs, investment banks, and marketing and communications firms. Often good news is interpreted with caution or skepticism, layoffs seem to be everywhere, and very few financings are occurring. We can have endless debates about whether this is deserved, but regardless it is shaking up the field.
Throughout this chaos, Vor Bio’s focus on bringing our unique approach to patients in need has not wavered. This somewhat culminated in an event earlier this month where we revealed data from our very first patient receiving an engineered hematopoietic stem cell transplant, with an amazing group of investors voting with their wallets to finance a $115.8M follow-on round. We count ourselves as part of the lucky few small company biotechs – fortunately, our program was sufficiently mature to deliver data from our first patient. This data was encouraging, and the biology appeared to play out consistent with our hypotheses. And this data was convincing enough to bring existing and some new investors into the family to allow more data to be generated, and to fund the next generation of therapeutics.
For this, we count ourselves fortunate and, more importantly, grateful.
We are grateful for maturity of our science to get into the clinic. We are grateful for supportive investors. For the passionate and humble fellowship of Voracians. And most of all, for the bravery of our first patient and the pioneering spirit of their care team. All of this has established a foundation from which Vor expects will accelerate generation of further data, launch a new program into the clinic, and build upon our platform science.
To all of those part of the Vor family and our supporters, we wish you a wonderful holiday season!