Flagship Ventures, a leading innovation and venture firm focused on healthcare and sustainability, announced it has launched Rubius Therapeutics, to develop functionalized red blood cells for the treatment of autoimmune conditions, metabolic diseases, cancer, and other serious diseases. Flagship has made an initial capital commitment of $25 million to enable Rubius to enter clinical testing of its novel therapeutic modality.
Rubius was co-founded by Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Jordi Mata-Fink, Ph.D., Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., all of Flagship VentureLabs®, the innovation foundry of Flagship. The academic co-founders are Harvey Lodish, Ph.D., and Hidde Ploegh, Ph.D., both of MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.