ROME Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA launched on 27 April with $50m in series A funding from GV, ARCH Venture Partners and Partners Innovation Fund. The company plans to develop treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases based on new insights into the repeatome – the 60% of the human genome consisting of repetitive sequences of nucleic acids, known as repeats. Several new drug targets and drug discovery programs are under way based on intellectual property licensed from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. ROME’s CEO is Rosana Kapeller, the GV entrepreneur-in-residence turned GV fellow who incubated the start-up at the Google-backed VC firm. Kapeller previously was the founding chief scientific officer of Nimbus Therapeutics, which sold its subsidiary Nimbus Apollo Inc. to Gilead Sciences Inc. in 2016 for up to $1.2bn. (Also see "Gilead Buys Nimbus NASH Drug To Dominate Another Liver Disease" - Scrip, 5 April, 2016.)

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