Teitur Trophics ApS, a spinout from Aarhus University seeded by the Bioinnovation Institute in 2020, has completed a €28 million (US$30.1 million) series A financing. Teitur has developed a platform of first-in-class cyclic peptides with a novel mechanism that preserves neuronal function, and these peptides have the potential to treat a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases.

Treatment with a cell-penetrating peptide that prevented nuclear export of unprocessed C9ORF72 RNA and its subsequent translation into neurotoxic dipeptide repeat proteins reduced motor neuron damage and death both in fruit fly models of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and in patient-derived induced neuronal precursor cells (iNPCs). The work suggests that targeting nuclear export could be a therapeutic option in ALS, and possibly also frontotemporal dementia (FTD), where C9ORF72 mutations also play a role.