ATP, a leader in life sciences venture capital, created Ascidian Therapeutics in 2020 to incubate and advance the company’s novel RNA exon-editing platform.
Rewriting RNA
Ascidian’s exon editing approach is mediated by pre-mRNA trans-splicing, a process in which two distinct RNA molecules are precisely linked to form a mature mRNA sequence. RNA trans-splicing is a phenomenon observed in multiple organisms, including ascidians—ancient ancestors of vertebrates—which deploy trans-splicing and other alternative splicing to enlarge and re-engineer their transcriptome.
Ascidian was founded to develop RNA exon editing therapeutics by leveraging high-throughput molecular biology in tandem with cutting-edge computational biology and structure-based RNA design.
