The Center for Innovative Technology announced today that its CIT GAP Funds closed an investment in Riogin, a Charlottesville-based company that has solved many issues related to peptide therapeutics. Riogin developed a technology platform that overcomes many of the problems connected to peptide therapeutics, which represents a growing portion of the market opportunity for big biopharma.
Current peptide drugs suffer from issues related to short half-lives, inconvenient frequency of dosing and administration, and undesirable side-effects. Riogin’s novel double-binding approach solves many of these problems and has the potential to make existing and future peptide drugs better and safer. CIT President and CEO Pete Jobse said, “Riogin provides an elegant solution to many pressing issues in peptide therapeutics.
Innovative solutions like these are what we look for when making CIT GAP Funds investments.” Riogin CEO Dr. Mario Geysen said, “We will use the investment from CIT GAP Funds to add an additional senior technical person to our team, which will increase our in-house assay capability and help scale our business more rapidly.” CIT GAP Funds is a family of seed- and early-stage investment funds placing near-equity and equity investments in Virginia-based high-growth technology, life science and clean technology companies.
Tom Weithman, CIT Vice President and GAP Funds Managing Director, said, “With an investment from CIT GAP Funds, Riogin is able to immediately expand translational research in an area of growing interest to biopharma, thus generating significant economic return within the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Since its 2005 launch, CIT GAP Funds has invested in over 100 companies across the Commonwealth of Virginia, deploying more than $13 million of public funds and attracting over $200 million more in private funding.
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