Cirrus Therapeutics

About Cirrus Therapeutics

Cirrus Therapeutics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company leveraging ocular immunology to create therapies for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), with a research site in Singapore. Its mission is to preserve sight and restore vision and to extend ocular healthspan by rejuvenating the eye's own immune defences across multiple disease pathways, rather than treating single downstream symptoms as traditional treatments do.

The focus is dry AMD, the leading cause of vision loss in people over 50, in which toxic deposits called drusen accumulate beneath the retina while cells critical for vision die off, and which the company says accounts for most AMD cases and affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Its pipeline addresses the full dry AMD spectrum, from early immune dysregulation through to advanced geographic atrophy (GA).

The lead program is an AAV gene therapy designed to restore IRAK-M, an immune regulator that declines with age, to youthful levels. Company scientists identified IRAK-M as a central regulator of immune homeostasis in the eye, and rare variants in the gene that encodes it are linked to higher AMD risk. By rebalancing immune signalling upstream, the therapy aims to reduce harmful inflammation, normalise cell metabolism and protect retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptors as a one-time, durable intervention for earlier stages. The second program is a next-generation retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cell therapy for patients with center-involving geographic atrophy, engineered to survive in the inflamed GA environment, replace lost cells and restore central vision.

Cirrus is a pre-commercial developer that advances its programs through preclinical and clinical development with academic collaborators, including the University of Bristol, UCL's institute of ophthalmology and the Singapore Eye Research Institute, and may partner or license its therapies as they mature. It competes in the ophthalmology gene and cell therapy market for geographic atrophy and dry AMD.