Oral drug delivery firm Lyndra raised $23 million in a Series A financing round led by Polaris Partners. Quark Venture and GF Securities, Yonghua Capital, Healthlink Capital, Partners Healthcare, Suffolk Equity, and other investors also participated.

Headed by CEO and co-founder, Amy Schulman, a partner at Polaris Partners, Lyndra is developing a platform for the sustained release, ultra long-acting oral delivery of small molecule or peptide drugs. The technology was originally developed by Lyndra co-founder Dr. Robert Langer’s team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Lyndra maintains that the encapsulated drug technology allows controlled, sustained drug release to allow weekly or potentially monthly dosing formulations.

Lyndra is harnessing the platform to develop a pipeline of once-weekly formulations of drugs in the field of neuropsychology. The firm is also working with pharma and biotech partners to develop ultra-long acting formulations of proprietary small molecules. Lyndra says it will use funds from the Series A investment to expand its manufacturing capacity and progress its lead candidate program, which it expects to take into first-in-human studies later this year.

“Lyndra’s ultra-long acting platform, originally developed for mass drug administration campaigns in the developing world, is particularly powerful because of the breadth of indications and compounds that the company can target and bring to patients,” commented Langer. “The number of lives we could touch with this technology is nearly limitless.”
 

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