LifeMine Closes Watertown's Largest Funding Round of 2026 and EyePoint's Phase 3 Miss
Plus a flurry of clinical trial updates and quarterly reports
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Watertown’s biggest VC raise this year was announced during our summer pause, but before reading on, consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribe to support our work.
Lifemine Therapeutics announces $263 million VC raise, Watertown’s largest VC raise in 2026.
Lifemine Therapeutics, headquartered at 66 Galen Street, announced last week that they raised $263 million across a combined Series D and Series E to accelerate development of the company’s lead asset LIFE-001. Lifemine was founded in 2016 by Harvard Professor Greg Verdine, with the goal of screening fungal genomes to search for new medicines. Fungi have been the source of multiple medicines, most famously the antibiotic penicillin. Lifemine’s lead compound LIFE-001 is in development for the prevention of organ transplant rejection, which affects 10-15% of organ transplants. LIFE-001 is a calcineurin inhibitor which prevents T-cells in the immune system from activating, preventing an immune response against the transplanted organ. The company initiated a dosing and tolerability Phase I trial of LIFE-001 2025, and is planning a Phase II trial during kidney transplantation and a Phase Ib trial during islet cell transplantation.
The $263 million raised by Lifemine doubles the Watertown biotech sector’s 2026 venture capital raise to $508 million, and the sector is closing in on 2025’s $546 million with 4 months left in the year. Over the last 18 months, firms in Watertown have raised over $1 billion in venture capital funding. Lifemine’s $188 million Series E raise also eclipsed Diagonal Therapeutics’ $125 million Series B raise from January as the largest single series raise in 2026. (Soon to be public Treeline Bio’s $421 million raise in 2024 remains the largest single series raise by a biotech in Watertown). Taken together, these strong fundraising rounds point to a continued recovery of the biotech sector in 2026 after several years of economic turbulence and contraction.
More about LifeMine and Greg Verdines’ other Watertown companies: read the BBJ’s coverage here
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Eyepoint’s Phase 3 LUGANO trial misses primary endpoint in Wet AMD
Eyepoint, headquartered at the Riverworks building, announced top line results from their LUGANO Phase 3 Trial of Duravyu in wet AMD, one of the things we are watching in 2026. While the trial successfully demonstrated a strong safety profile and a reduced treatment burden (measured as the number of injections needed for treatment), the trial failed to meet its primary endpoint of change from baseline in best corrected visual acuity compared to FDA approved Eylea (aflibercept). The company in their press release explained that the endpoint miss was due to vision loss experienced by 9 patients in the Duravyu cohort that was not caused by wet AMD, a phenomenon that on average happened to 3%-5% of wet AMD clinical trial patients in previous trials, but was not observed at all in the control cohort. When these patients were excluded, the company says Duravyu was non-inferior to Eylea.
With these disappointing results, the company is now looking towards its LUCIA Duravyu Phase 3 Trial, which was setup identically to Lugano, and aims to report data in Q4 2026. If the results from Lugano are positive, the company says it intends to file a new drug application in the first half of 2027. The company’s stock price fell by more than 70% on Monday after the data release.
Eyepoint is one of three Watertown companies working on a treatment for wet AMD, a disease where new leaky blood vessels grow under the macula in the eye, leading to scarring and loss of vision. Eyepoint’s Duravyu insert is an engineered biodegradable scaffold designed for the extended (>6 months) release of a tyrosine kinase inhibitor small molecule to stop blood vessel growth. Ingenia Therapeutics (Lynx Building) which recently IPO’ed on the South Korean stock market, has partnered with Merck to develop an antibody to stop blood vessel growth (MK-8748) which entered a Phase 2b/3 trial in April. Watertown is also the US headquarters of Shanghai-based Frontera Therapeutics, which recently received an FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy designation for their in development wet AMD therapy FT-003, a gene therapy that causes the eye to produce the inhibitory protein aflibercept, which stops new blood vessel growth. Aflibercept is the generic name of the Eylea control used in Eyepoint’s Phase 3 LUGANO trial. Frontera has recently applied for permits to expand their lab at Cambridge Scientific.
More about Eyepoint’s Phase 3 Trial: read Fierce Biotech’s coverage here
Quick Hits
Pre-Clinical and Clinical Trial News
Acrivon advanced their WEE1/PKMYT1 inhibitor ACR-2316 into the dose escalation phase of its Phase 1/2 study.
Eyepoint announced they completed enrollment of their COMO and CAPRI Phase 3 trials of Duravyu for the treatment of Diabetic Macular Edema.
Camp4 announced the clearance of their Phase 1/2 trial of CMP-002 for SYNGAP-1 related disorder by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Neumora reported favorable toxicology results for NMRA-215 NLRP3 in development for obesity and cardiometabolic disease, supporting IND submission in Q4 2026 and a Phase 1 clinical trial initiation by the end of 2026.
Earnings
Neumora, Acrivon , Century, C4, Enanta, Tectonic, Kymera, Disc, Werewolf, and Eyepoint all released quarterly earnings reports.
Camp4 announced the receipt of the second tranche ($50.1 million) of their private placement from September 2025.
People
Kymera appointed Terence Rooney, MD as Chief Medical Officer.
Neumora appointed Joshua Pinto, PhD as CEO and member of the Board of Directors.
That’s all for this week!
