Atlas Molecular Pharma closes a EUR 3 million round of funding to advance clinical development of a drug to treat congenital erythropoietic porphyria

SPRI becomes a shareholder of the company, a spin-off of CIC bioGUNE, together with the asset management company Inveready and the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), among other investors

Atlas develops pharmacological chaperones for the treatment of rare and ultra-rare metabolic diseases

Atlas Molecular Pharma (Atlas), a spin-off of the CIC bioGUNE research centre – a member of the BRTA – and set up with the aim of developing new pharmacological chaperones for the treatment of rare metabolic diseases, has completed a EUR 3,000,000 round of funding, with the public body CDTI and the EZTEN Venture Capital Fund of the SPRI Group (Basque Business Development Agency) becoming company shareholders. The round of funding is led by the Donostia-San Sebastián-based asset management company Inveready, with the participation of the company’s current partners.

Atlas, a company founded in Bizkaia in 2015, is headed by Óscar Millet, PhD in organic chemistry, and Joaquín Castilla, PhD in molecular biology. Atlas’ lead candidate, ATL-001, acts as a pharmacological chaperone by stabilising and recovering the function of UROIIIS, the protein which, when defective due to inherited mutations, causes the accumulation of toxic porphyrins and, consequently, congenital erythropoietic porphyria. ATL-001 has showed promising results in representative animal models and has been granted orphan drug designation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).