CFF Mission Ventures Industry Investment
Offers startup and industry teams with commercialization support for CFF Mission Ventures Industry Investment in biotechnology, medical technology, and synthetic biology.
CFF Mission Ventures is the venture-philanthropy investment arm of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, deploying capital to for-profit pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies developing treatments for cystic fibrosis. The program operates on a rolling basis with no formal RFA cycle; companies submit investment inquiries directly through missionventures.cff.org. Investments are structured as milestone-based contracts combined with royalty agreements or equity stakes, not clean grants. Award sizes vary widely: recent examples from CFF's 2024 annual report include up to $15 million to Prime Medicine for prime editing in CF, up to $8.5 million to SpliSense for Phase 2 splicing-mutation genetic therapy, $6.6 million to Sionna Therapeutics for modulator development, and $5 million each to Clarametyx Biosciences and BiomX for infection-focused Phase 2 programs.
Eligibility is restricted to for-profit companies; academic institutions, nonprofits, and individual investigators are ineligible. CFF Mission Ventures funds across a broad TRL range, from early discovery through late-stage clinical programs. Priority therapeutic areas mirror CFF's strategic agenda: CFTR modulators, genetic therapies (gene editing, mRNA, prime editing), anti-infective approaches targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa and other CF pathogens, mucus-clearance agents, and anti-inflammatory strategies. Approximately 10–15% of CF patients cannot access or tolerate current CFTR modulators, and Mission Ventures specifically targets programs serving those unmet populations alongside next-generation modulator work.
Beyond cash investment, CFF Mission Ventures provides non-financial support that is difficult to replicate elsewhere: access to patient-derived samples (sputum, bronchial epithelial cells with defined CFTR mutations), introductions to CF key opinion leaders and clinical investigators, and feedback from the patient and care-provider community to inform clinical trial design. The Foundation's track record — it helped fund Vertex's development of Kalydeco and sold the royalty stream for $3.3 billion in 2014 — gives Mission Ventures credibility as a partner for companies entering the CF space. Current CFF assets under management exceed $4 billion.
Provides venture-philanthropy investments of $5 million to $25 million or more to for-profit companies advancing cystic fibrosis drug development, including CFTR modulators, genetic therapies, anti-infectives, and mucus-clearance agents.
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