Immitra Bio raises €2.58M to build mutation-agnostic in-vivo gene editing that doesn't need a lab to customise per patient

Immitra Bio, a Plan-les-Ouates biotech founded in 2024 as a spinout from ETH Zürich, has closed a CHF 2.4 million / €2.58 million pre-seed round led by Backbone Ventures and co-led by OCCIDENT. Additional participants include Another VC, Kickfund, Venture Kick, Zürcher Kantonalbank, FONGIT, and the ETH Foundation. The company is developing a mutation-agnostic in-vivo gene editing platform, with a lead candidate — IB-003 — targeting inherited anaemia.

The founding team brings the scientific depth the thesis requires. Jan Nelis (CEO) and Amir Taheri co-founded the company alongside Jacob Corn, a gene editing researcher whose lab at ETH Zürich produced much of the platform's foundational work. The company's registered address in Plan-les-Ouates places it in the Geneva biotech cluster, close to the University of Geneva hospitals and the broader life sciences infrastructure of the Lake Geneva region.

What ex-vivo cannot solve

Gene editing has moved from laboratory curiosity to clinical reality over the past decade. CRISPR-Cas9 and base-editing approaches have produced approved therapies — most notably Casgevy for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassaemia. But most of what is now in clinical development shares a common architecture: cells are taken out of the patient, edited outside the body (ex-vivo), and reinfused. That architecture has a structural problem. The manufacturing process must be run for each patient individually, which means cost and logistics scale with patient count rather than with platform scale. It also means the therapy must be engineered to work for a specific patient's mutation — which, in diseases like inherited anaemia that carry hundreds of known variants, creates a long tail of patients who don't fit any approved product.

Immitra Bio's approach skips the extraction step entirely. Its non-viral delivery platform is designed to carry the editing machinery directly into the target cells inside the patient's body. The platform is built to be mutation-agnostic — it aims to repair gene function without being designed to a specific variant — which is the property that unlocks scale: one formulation, across a broad patient population, without a per-patient manufacturing run.

"At Immitra Bio, we are advancing a fundamentally new approach to gene editing therapies," said Jan Nelis, CEO. "Our goal is to make gene editing therapies scalable, commercially viable, and accessible to patients."

The lead investor's view

Philippe Bernet of Backbone Ventures described the investment in terms of platform architecture rather than any single indication. "Their elegant approach to mutation-agnostic gene editing has the potential to overcome important limitations of current therapies," he said. "This is exactly the type of innovative science we look for — fundamental IP, a strong founding team, and a clear path to meaningful clinical impact."

The CHF 2.4 million pre-seed funds the preclinical development of IB-003 and continued build-out of the non-viral delivery platform. Inherited anaemia is a strategically sensible first indication: it is well-characterised, has an established path to regulatory approval, and the mutation diversity of the patient population is precisely the environment where mutation-agnostic design matters most. The efficacy hurdle at preclinical stage — whether in-vivo non-viral delivery achieves editing rates in animal models that predict clinical utility — is what this capital is designed to address before the company moves toward IND-enabling studies.