This blood drive has no shortage of donors.
Rubius Therapeutics, the Cambridge biotech startup that wants to turn our own red blood cells into potent new medicines, said Thursday that it has raised another $100 million in private financing to fund its experimental work. The company has collected $220 million in venture capital in under nine months, and a total of $245 million since early 2015.
Founded in 2014 by the life sciences venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering, Rubius — whose name means “red’’ in Latin — raised more during that nine-month period than any other privately held biotech in Massachusetts except for Moderna Therapeutics, according to a Rubius spokeswoman. Moderna, a messenger RNA drug developer that was also created by Flagship, announced a $500 million fund-raising round in February.
Rubius has 67 employees, but expects to reach about 100 by the summer and outgrow its offices at 325 Vassar St. and 99 Erie St., said Torben Straight Nissen, the company’s president. He hopes the company will be able to move in November to 399 Binney St., a building now under construction, where it will occupy 45,000 square feet and be the anchor tenant.
The growing bankroll and workforce, he said, reflect investor enthusiasm about the company’s drug-discovery approach. Rubius is working to use stem cells collected from a patient’s blood to create new red blood cells. Those cells are then genetically modified by a virus to carry proteins that could treat a broad range of conditions.
“We are the only company in the world that’s able to grow blood in bioreactors and arm that blood to treat enzyme deficiencies, rare diseases, cancer, and autoimmune diseases,’’ said Nissen, who joined the startup about 15 months ago after overseeing development of Pfizer’s drug portfolio. “No one else is working on this approach.’’
Rubius’s scientific strategy is part of a broader Flagship effort to focus not on individual drug candidates but on “platform’’ technologies capable of generating many medicines, according to Flagship chief executive Noubar Afeyan.
Rubius has already made and armed about 250 red cells — “super blood,’’ Nissen called it — that produce different proteins to act as catalysts for medicines. The company has been testing them on mice. Within a year, Rubius plans to test the cells on patients in clinical trials.
The company is concentrating on three categories of illnesses: so-called orphan diseases, each of which afflicts fewer than 200,000 people in the United States; various types of cancer; and autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.
FierceBiotech, an online news service that covers biotechnology, in 2016 named Rubius one of its “Fierce 15’’ — promising startups that, unlike most in the high-risk industry, have a “genuine chance of being the Next Big Thing.’’
Rubius, which initially raised $25 million in early 2015, started in Flagship VentureLabs, a Kendall Square incubator that has spawned dozens of companies. Kendall Square has become a mecca for incubators, given the premium on rental space.
Rubius isn’t the only Cambridge biotech to announce a substantial private fund-raising round this week. Generation Bio, an Atlas Venture-backed gene therapy startup, said this week it had raised $100 million not two months after disclosing that it had received $25 million in financing.
For Rubius, the latest round of capital represents “crossover financing’’ that occurs before a company has an initial public offering and sells stock to the public. Investors included people who put up money in previous rounds as well as mutual funds and institutional investors, Nissen said. He gave no timetable for when the company will go public.
David Epstein, executive chairman of Rubius and executive partner of Flagship, said the fund-raising “further validates the potential’’ of Rubius’s approach to making medicines. Epstein is the former chief executive of Novartis Pharmaceuticals, a division of Novartis AG.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com
