New York-based Catalio Capital Management, founded by Johns Hopkins alumni George Petrocheilos and R. Jacob Vogelstein to invest in life sciences firms, has joined a $130 million Series B funding round for GlycoEra AG, a Swiss biotech company with key labs in Newton, Mass.

The funding round was led by a new investor, Denmark’s Novo Holdings, which is linked to a foundation run by Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk. Other new investors included London’s LifeArc Ventures, Qatar’s QIA, Massachusetts firms Agent Capital and MP Healthcare Venture Management, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, and Canada’s Sixty Degree Capital. Existing investors who joined the round included France’s Sofinnova Partners, San Francisco-based 5AM Ventures, Switzerland’s Roche Ventures and New York-based Bristol Myers Squibb.

GlycoEra, which is tapping best-in-class extracellular protein degraders to treat autoimmune diseases, added Catalio’s principal Matthew Hobson, Novo Holdings’ Max Klement and LifeArc partner Sohaib Mir to its board. The company said it would use the proceeds to advance its lead IgG4-targeted protein degrader through clinical data, bring a second program to the clinic and further develop its pipeline of precision extracellular degraders in immunology and additional indications.

“Our lead program, which has demonstrated deep and rapid IgG4 degradation preclinically, presents an opportunity to deliver transformative therapies to patients suffering from multiple autoimmune diseases. With this financing, we plan to initiate first-in-human clinical trials for our lead program later this year,” said GlycoEra CEO Ganesh Kaundinya, who has a doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT.

Kaundinya said the funding round was “strong validation” of the company’s science and platform, and would allow it to accelerate its lead program into clinical development, while advancing a “robust pipeline of precision immunology medicines.”

Catalio was spun out of investment firm Camden Partners in 2020 by Petrocheilos and Vogelstein, the son of famed geneticist Bert. Initially established in Baltimore, the healthcare- and life sciences-focused firm sold a minority stake to investment powerhouse KKR in 2023, and named Henry Kravis, co-founder and co-executive chairman of KKR, as chairman of its board of advisers. Its other high-profile investors include Philippe Laffont, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Coatue Management, Thoma Bravo, Brevan Howard and Stanley Druckenmiller.

Petrocheilos has degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and previously ran HealthCor and the hedge fund Global Domain. He was only 22 when he made Baltimore Business Journal’s “40 under 40.” Petrocheilos, who serves as Catalio’s managing partner, is among the board of trustees at Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore School for the Arts and Johns Hopkins Center for Financial Economics.

Vogelstein, who worked with Petrocheilos at Camden, served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University — teaching at both the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Whiting School of Engineering. He earned a BSc. degree in bio-electrical engineering from Brown University and a Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Catalio boasts of partnerships with 36 world-renowned scientists, each of whom has also been an entrepreneur. It has backed some startups trying to commercialize cancer research by Vogelstein’s father Bert. Its recent investments include Syndeio Biosciences, Imbria Pharmaceuticals, Character Biosciences, Perceive Pharma and Aviceda Therapeutics.

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