Just days after gene editor Tome Biosciences announced undisclosed operational cuts, a clearer picture is coming into focus as 131 employees are being laid off.
The biotech, which emerged with $213 million late last year, will complete the layoffs by Nov. 1 to Nov. 14, according to a Massachusetts Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) report filed Friday.
Last Thursday, Tome CEO Rahul Kakkar told Endpoints News that the biotech had just over 130 staffers and that no layoffs were announced during a company-wide meeting earlier in the week.
“Despite our clear scientific progress, investor sentiment has shifted dramatically across the gene editing space, particularly for preclinical companies,” a Tome spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in an Aug. 22 emailed statement. “Given this, the company is operating at reduced capacity, maintaining core expertise, and we are in ongoing confidential conversations with multiple parties to explore strategic options.”
At the time, the company didn’t answer questions about how many employees would be affected by the changes.
Earlier last week, one person with knowledge of the situation told Stat—the first publication to report on the operational changes at Tome—that the biotech was facing a shutdown if it didn’t secure a buyer by Nov. 1.
CEO Kakkar denied that theory last Thursday in his interview with Endpoints.
The biotech is riddled with a series of contradictions, starting with the $213 combined series A and B raised eight months ago to welcome in a “new era of genomic medicines based on programmable genomic integration (PGI).”
Shortly after publicly debuting, Tome acquired DNA editing company Replace Therapeutics for $65 million in cash and near-term milestone payments.
More recently, the biotech shared data at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy annual meeting in May. It was there that Tome revealed its lead programs to be a gene therapy for phenylketonuria and a cell therapy for renal autoimmune diseases, both in preclinical development.
Furthermore, Tome said its team would be at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Genome Engineering: CRISPR Frontiers meeting, according to a company LinkedIn post published three days ago. The event takes place Aug. 27 through Aug. 31, and Tome said it would be presenting a poster presentation tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. ET.
The biotech also lists four job openings on its website.
Fierce Biotech has reached out to Tome for comment and will update this article if more information becomes available.