Moonlight Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company developing a platform to treat food allergies, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the company's Investigational New Drug (IND) application for MOON101 to initiate its first clinical trial in individuals with peanut allergy. In addition, Moonlight has raised private funds to support clinical development of MOON101 and received a new grant from the U.S. Defense Health Agency (DHA)'s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) to expand its pipeline beyond MOON101.

Last year, Moonlight raised its first equity round of $2.4 million in Seed funding from Portal Innovations, Allerfund, and Invest Georgia that would enabled the company to initiate its first clinical trial, SURVEYOR. The FDA clearance of the IND application for MOON101 will now enable the start of the SURVEYOR trial whose aim will be to evaluate the safety of MOON101 in peanut allergic adults and children. The trial will be funded through a $3 million cooperative grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and new private funding from SOSV, a global deep tech venture capital firm.