Immunai Launches With $20M Seed Funding And Plan To Map The Immune System

Immunai came out of stealth mode Thursday with two things: a mission to map the entire immune system and its functions using machine learning, and a capital infusion of $20 million in seed funding.

Two Israeli investment firms, Viola Group and TLV Partners, led the seed round for the New York City-based company that is building the largest proprietary data set in the world for clinical immunological data for better detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease. By leveraging single-cell technologies and machine-learning algorithms, Immunai has mapped out millions of immune cells and their functions, Immunai CEO Noam Solomon told Crunchbase News.

Over the last several years, cell therapies and cancer immunotherapies have become the latest innovation in treatment options. Immunotherapy uses the body’s immune system to target and destroy cancer cells.

Cancers, such as melanoma and lung cancer, have responded well to immunotherapy drugs, also known as immune checkpoint inhibitors. However, the immune system is complex and it is not yet known how drugs affect immune cells. And for costly cell therapies, a slight variation in cell therapy products can have a significant influence on a patient’s response to the therapy, Solomon said.

“Drugs that improve immune response to cancer are transformational for some patients, but don’t work in 50 (percent) to 70 percent of other patients,” he said. “We are trying to understand what therapies work—when they work—by measuring the immune system at high resolutions. We can then use those insights to improve the design of combination therapies.”

Immunai leverages single-cell technologies to profile cells from a blood sample. Its proprietary database then uses machine-learning algorithms to map the hundreds of cell types and their states to create an immune profile. That profile is then used to support biomarker discovery and insights that identify how a cell responds to its changing environment.

Solomon and Immunai CTO Luis Voloch founded the company in January 2019, and were later joined by cancer immunology scientist Ansu Satpathy, and data scientist Danny Wells, a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

The company has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel, and has already established clinical partnerships with 10 medical centers, as well as multiple commercial partnerships for cell therapy and checkpoint blockade with biopharma companies.

Immunai closed on the new round of funding three months ago and will use it to further the development of its technology and business functions while expanding its team of scientists, engineers and machine-learning experts, Solomon said.

“We have closed a substantial contract with a Fortune 100 company and will sign a few others in the next few weeks,” he said. “We are providing partnership models with hospitals, academia, biotech and biopharma partners with a goal of finding biomarkers for resistance and toxicity for drugs and to help partners accelerate the FDA approval of their drugs.”

Source. Crunchbase, May 14, 2020

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Volastra Therapeutics Raises $12M in Seed Financing

Volastra Therapeutics, a NYC-based biotechnology company developing novel therapies for the treatment of metastatic cancers, raised $12m in funding.

The round was led by Polaris Partners with participation from DROIA Oncology Ventures, the Global Health Sciences (GHS) Fund (Quark Venture LP and GF Securities), and ARCH Venture Partners.

The company intends to use the funds to develop therapies for metastatic cancers by targeting key pathways related to chromosomal instability, a hallmark of cancer metastasis.

Founded by Drs. Lewis Cantley, Samuel Bakhoum, and Olivier Elemento, Volastra is a biotechnology company focused on developing novel therapies for patients with metastatic cancers by exploiting unique insights into chromosomal instability. The company also will utilize an extensive library of organoids derived from metastatic cancer samples to elucidate how tumors spread and devise therapeutic strategies that target chromosomal instability during the process of cancer metastasis. The platform enables Volastra to perform rigorous target validation, to advance first-in-class clinical candidates, and to identify biomarkers to stratify patients for clinical trials.

Volastra Therapeutics’ operations are located at Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS at New York City (JLABS @ NYC).

Following the deal, Executive Chair Sandra Peterson, a Partner at Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice, a Board Member of Microsoft, and the former Group Worldwide Chairman of Johnson & Johnson, will lead the Volastra Board of Directors. Polaris Managing Partner Amy Schulman will serve alongside Ms. Peterson on the company’s Board of Directors with DROIA Partner Luc Dochez and GHS Fund CSO and Partner Zafi Avnur. Dr. Bakhoum will represent the scientific founders on the company’s Board.

Source. FinSMEs, February 11, 2020.

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

PierianDx raises $27M in Series B to ‘democratize’ next-generation sequencing

A startup that aims to provide a software-as-a-service platform to allow genomic sequencing as a standard of care has raised its latest round of financing.

St. Louis-based PierianDx said Monday that it had closed a $27 million Series B funding round, led by ATW Partners and SJW Ventures, along with existing investors Health Catalyst Capital, Inova health Systems, RTI International and ARUP Laboratories. 

The company closed its Series A round, for $9.3 million, in January 2016.

“PierianDx has grown tremendously over the past 18 months and is continuing to add the clinical expertise and resources necessary to execute on our vision,” PierianDx Executive Chairman Rakesh Nagarajan said in a statement. “Our team is uniquely skilled and dedicated to the adoption of clinical [next-generation sequencing] around the globe.”

The company’s stated goal is “democratization” of NGS, with a focus on making targeted therapies for cancers more accessible to healthcare systems, labs and patients. The company’s software system is called Clinical Genomicist Workspace and is described as providing clinical labs more streamlined and accurate analysis, interpretation and reporting for accelerating personalized medicine programs.

NGS involves genetically sequencing cancers and find proteins that can be targeted with certain drugs in order to increase the chances of efficacy. For some drugs, doing so is crucial, such as those that target biomarkers independent of what tissue a tumor affects, such as Merck & Co.’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) for microsatellite instability-high and mismatch repair-deficient cancers and the two approved NTRK inhibitors, Bayer’s Vitrakvi (larotrectinib) and Roche’s Rozlytrek (entrectinib).

Nevertheless, implementing NGS can come with some challenges as well. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Molecular Case Studies, researchers at Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon, wrote that NGS has proven to have tremendous power to detect and characterize a broad spectrum of mutations across many gene targets. However, “This power of NGS also results     in significant challenges related to technical expertise, bioinformatics, computing infrastructure, laboratory practices, and integration into clinical decision-making.”

Source. Medcity News , Alaric Dearment  October 28, 2019

*** 

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

ArsenalBio emerges from stealth with $85 million and a dream team to fight cancer

The story behind ArsenalBio begins with Sean Parker’s Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Founded in 2016, the Institute has been instrumental in providing a space for the top researchers into cancer across different fields to collaborate and communicate on the latest breakthroughs in settings that range from formal meetings to informal retreats.

It was at one of these informal retreats that luminaries like Dr. Bradley Bernstein, a professor of pathology and researcher at the Broad Institute; W. Nicholas Haining, vice president of discovery oncology at Merck Research Laboratories; Dr. Alexander Mason, an associate professor of immunology at the University of California San Francisco; and E. John Wherry, a professor of systems immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, began to talk about the current state of the art in cancer diagnostics and therapies and the technologies powering cell-based therapies to potentially cure cancer.

Parker suggested that rather than have each of these researchers spin their technologies out into separate companies that would develop one discrete innovation that would be needed to get to a cell-based therapy for solid tumors, the researchers should combine forces and build an arsenal of tools for the discovery and development of potential cures.

“I look at this as a tour de force of a combination of bringing academics together who typically would start separate companies and get them working together with a dream team management team,” says Beth Seidenberg, the founder of Westlake Village BioPartners and an investor in ArsenalBio. 

Indeed, the management team is just as impressive as the researchers behind the project. Kleiner Perkins founding partner Brooke Byers recruited Dr. Ken Drazan to serve as a consultant to the company as it was getting off the ground. Drazan, now the company’s chief executive, was the former president of the cancer research and diagnostics startup Grail and has served as an executive and founder at a number of healthcare startups and large medical companies.

With Drazan on board, the company quickly recruited the rest of the management team: Jane Grogan, the former principal scientist in charge of adaptive tumor and cell therapy at Genentech; Michael Kalos, the former vice president of immuno-oncology and cell therapies at Janssen Oncology; and Tarjei Mikkelsen, the former vice president of biology at 10x Genomics.

ArsenalBio initially formed as a shell company with seed financing from investors in 2018, basically on the back of its technical team and nascent executive staff.

Alongside the powerhouse executive team and scientific founders, ArsenalBio has now raked in $85 million in financing from investors including Westlake Village, the PICI, Kleiner Perkins, the University of California San Francisco Foundation Investment Company, Euclidean Capital and Osage University Partners.

The idea is to improve the ability of T cell therapies to fight a broader range of cancers more effectively. T cell treatments have already shown amazing promise with certain types of cancer, but have not been able to effectively treat the solid tumors that represent the deadliest manifestation of the disease.

To tackle solid tumors like sarcomas, carcinomas and lymphomas, doctors need to figure out how to deliver the T cells first to the area around the tumor and then to the right tissues where the tumor is spreading. That requires a set of biological instructions, which, in many cases have yet to be discovered.

“We need to get the cells to deal with the tumor microenvironment,” says Seidenberg.

T cells are the human body’s natural response to fighting off infections and disease. Cancers essentially turn off that natural immune response by signaling to the cells that a tumor is actually something they should ignore rather than attack.

“Our goal is to program [cells] by delivering additional  instructions to tell the T cell to ignore the instructions from the tumor… to ignore the signals,” says Drazan. 

The company is still developing its first product strategies now, Drazan says. But ArsenalBio will be selling two different types of technologies. The first will be the medicines themselves that will be used to cure certain types of cancer. The second will be the sequences of genes that can be used to counteract or override the signals that are coming from different types of tumors which prohibit T cells from performing their normal functions.

Drazan compared those sequences to programs on GitHub that other researchers, clinicians and companies could use to develop their own therapies.

“ArsenalBio allows us to rewrite vast stretches of code to give T cells dramatic new functions — that means they can be made to be more effective at killing cancer and a broad spectrum of other diseases,” said Sean Parker, founder and chairman of PICI and ArsenalBio director, in a statement. “It’s also very rewarding to see ArsenalBio born from the deep collaboration of PICI investigators — who worked together across research centers, hospitals and universities on the science behind these technologies. The company’s very existence demonstrates how much faster and better we can get therapies from bench to bedside when we collaborate and put patients first.”

Source. TechCrunch, Johnathan Schreiber, October 17, 2019

*** 

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Fred Hutch spinout SEngine raises $5.1M to test cancer treatment drugs against a patient’s tumors

Seattle startup SEngine Precision Medicine has raised $5.1 million in fresh funding as it looks to commercialize a platform that can match cancer patients to the right drug and aid in drug discovery. The Series A round was led by the Bangarang Group along with other unnamed investors.

Since every patient’s cancer is unique, it’s important to know which drug or drug combinations will work best. SEngine’s PARIS test grows a patient’s tumor cells in a lab, then analyzes them to determine the safest and most effective medications. Cancer doctors can also pick and choose which drugs they want to test for from SEngine’s library of more than 200 small molecule drugs.

Sometimes the test can lead to surprises, like when one patient’s thyroid cancer tumor responded to a drug developed for ovarian cancer. “The mutations that underlie each individual cancer can be very common, even from very disparate cancer types,” said SEngine CEO Dr. Carla Grandori.

continued below

_______________________________________________________________

Sponsor

myCareBase is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.

To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.

_______________________________________________________________

In the process of testing cancers from a range of different patients, SEngine also collects data that can be valuable in the hunt for new drugs — an application that Grandori says could be far more lucrative than screening tumors for suitable drugs. The startup recently entered a joint venture with San Francisco-based Atomwise aimed at finding new cancer drugs.

“We continue to see the immense potential for Dr. Grandori and her world-class team to radically transform cancer care through their personalized diagnostic platform and novel drug discovery program,” Elliott Burkland, an investor with the Bangarang Group, said in a statement.

The startup’s advisors include Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, as well as Dr. Leland Hartwell, a Nobel Prize Laureate and former president of Fred Hutch. The company hired former Spaceflight Industries executive Tom Neary as chief financial officer in August.

SEngine, which spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2015, previously reported raising $3 million that was part of this Series A round. It also received $755,000 in grant funding from the National Institute of Health in May 2018. The company has raised more than $9 million to date.

Source. GeekWire, , James Thorne, October 2 , 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Amphivena raises $62M Series C round to develop bispecific antibody in solid tumors

A company developing a bispecific antibody that already has clinical data in blood cancers has raised more than $60 million in its latest venture capital funding round that it plans to use to advance the drug in solid tumors.

South San Francisco, California-based Amphivena Therapeutics said Tuesday that it had raised $62 million in a Series C round, which NanoDimension and Qiming Venture Partners co-led. New investors included Clough Capital, Aju IB, Korys Merieux, Kaitai Capital, Industrial Investors and Nawton Limited, along with insider investors MPM Capital and funds managed by Tekla Capital Management and Franklin Berger.

The company is developing a bispecific T-cell engager antibody called AMV564, which targets CD33 and CD3. Such antibodies are immunotherapies designed to work by targeting both cancer cell-surface proteins and proteins expressed on the surfaces of T cells, enabling the latter to kill the former. The company has been developing the drug for acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes, and it is currently in a Phase I study among relapsed or refractory AML.

The drug is designed to eliminate myeloid-derived suppressor cells, or MDSCs, while sparing normal neutrophils and monocytes. In addition to MDS and AML, the drug is in a Phase I study for solid tumors that the company said is open for enrollment, though searches for the name of the company of the drug on ClinicalTrials.gov only turned up the MDS and AML trials.

Updated data from the AML study presented at the European Hematology Association’s 2019 annual meeting in July from 33 patients across nine dose cohorts showed a complete response, a complete response with incomplete hematological recovery and a partial response. Grade 1 and 2 cytokine release syndrome – a side effect sometimes observed with bispecific antibodies – also occurred.

Amgen’s Blincyto (blinatumomab) is a bispecific T-cell engager currently on the market. The drug targets the CD19 antigen in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Amgen is developing another bispecific antibody, AMG 420, that targets the BCMA antigen in multiple myeloma and produced a 70 percent overall response rate among patients who received the drug at 400 micrograms, the dose recommended for further study. Another bispecific antibody on the market is Roche’s Hemlibra (emicizumab-kxwh), used to treat hemophilia A.

In late June, the Food and Drug Administration issued a draft guidance for companies developing bispecific antibodies, in oncology as well as other disease areas. However, an expert said the guidance was flawed because it did not distinguish between Blincyto and Hemlibra’s very different mechanisms of action, despite both products falling under the category of “bispecific.”

Source. Medcity News, September, 24, 2019,  Alaric Dearment

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Achilles Therapeutics raises $120M in Series B round for cancer cell therapy

Stevenage, U.K.-based Achilles Therapeutics said Tuesday that it had raised 100 million pounds – equal to about $120 million – in a Series B round, led by RA Capital Management. Founding investor Syncona participated, along with Forbion, Perceptive Advisors and Redmile Group.

The company said proceeds for the round will be used to launch two clinical trials of its product candidates in non-small cell lung cancer and melanoma. Its pipeline page lists multicenter Phase I/IIa studies for both indications. Both trials are listed also on ClinicalTrials.gov, with the page for the NSCLC study stating it is currently open for recruitment.

Achilles’ approach involves personalized T-cell therapies that target clonal neoantigens, which are protein markers unique to each patient that are present on the surface of cancer cells. The starting material for the products, known as clonal neoantigen T cells – or cNeT – consists of T cells isolated from a tumor sample known as tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs.

“The Achilles approach integrates years of multi-disciplinary scientific and clinical knowledge from immuno-oncology, cell therapy and genomics with the goal of creating a TIL-based therapeutic enriched with T cells reacting against clonal neoantigens,” RA Capital Management Derek DiRocco said in a statement. “We believe this approach may represent the optimal way to expand the utility of polyclonal TIL therapy to multiple solid tumor types and has the potential to provide profound clinical benefit for patients living with cancer.”

TILs represent one of multiple kinds of cell therapies currently in development for cancers. Another company developing them is Iovance, which said in July that, per discussions with the Food and Drug Administration, it could use data from its Phase II study of a TIL in cervical cancer to seek the agency’s approval.

Other types of cell therapies include T-cell receptors, or TCRs, and chimeric antigen receptor T-cells, or CAR-T. Novartis’ Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) and Gilead Sciences’ Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) are CAR-Ts with FDA approval for blood cells, both targeting the CD19 antigen.

Source. Medcity News, Alaric Dearment, September 4, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax

Oncorus Adds $79.5M to Steer Cancer-Fighting Virus to Human Testing

Nearly four years ago, the FDA approved a therapy that uses a virus to infect tumor cells and break them down—the first such viral therapy for treating cancer. Oncorus CEO Ted Ashburn says there’s room to improve on these oncolytic viruses and their role in immunotherapy, and his biotech startup is getting ready to show how.

Oncorus is planning to begin a clinical trial next year testing its cancer-fighting virus in solid tumors. The Cambridge, MA, company now has $79.5 million in financing to support its research. The Series B round of funding announced Wednesday was co-led by Cowen Healthcare Investments and Perceptive Advisors.

Research on oncolytic viruses dates to the 1960s. The concept involves using a virus, one that occurs naturally or is engineered, to infect a tumor cell. Once inside the tumor, the virus replicates until it causes the cell to explode, killing it. These cells deaths lead to the immunotherapy step of the treatment. Tumor antigens are released that trigger the immune system to recognize and fight the cancer.

The first FDA-approved oncolytic virus, talimogene laherparepvec (Imlygic), is based on a modified herpes simplex virus. The Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) therapy is injected into the tumor, where the virus replicates and produces a protein intended to stimulate an immune system response. The FDA’s 2015 approval of the Amgen therapy covered melanoma that cannot be treated with surgery.

Like Amgen’s oncolytic virus, lead Oncorus drug candidate ONCR-177 is based on a modified version of the herpes virus. But Ashburn says that Oncorus has made advances in the way it engineers the virus to enable it to carry a bigger therapeutic payload. Onboard ONCR-177 are five anti-cancer proteins that stimulate different parts of the immune system.

“In effect what you’re doing is causing a robust, therapeutic, personalized vaccination for the patient,” says Ashburn.

The Oncorus virus also comes with additional safety measures. Ashburn says ONCR-177 is engineered to replicate only in tumor cells, not in healthy tissue. At the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in April, Oncorus presented preclinical data showing that treatment with ONCR-177 partially or completely shrunk tumors, and the viral therapy led to protective immunity. Ashburn adds that the safety measures appeared to work: No signs of the virus or its therapeutic payload were detected outside of the tumor.

Ashburn says he envisions ONCR-177 being used in combination with checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy that blocks proteins that stop the immune system from recognizing and fighting cancer cells. But in some instances, the oncolytic virus could find use as a standalone treatment, he says.

The company has a second therapeutic candidate in its pipeline based on a synthetic oncolytic virus. Ashburn says this virus is meant to be given intravenously, and that it would circulate throughout the body. Using this approach would allow the virus to potentially treat a wider range of tumors, including lung cancer, where direct injection of a therapy is not practical because it risks puncturing the organ, he says.

Oncorus plans to use the new capital to finance Phase 1 tests of ONCR-177. The company will also continue development of its synthetic oncolytic virus. Ashburn says he expects the company will identify a candidate from that platform early next year.

The research that underpins Oncorus was conducted within venture capital firm MPM Capital until the company spun out in 2016 with $57 million in financing. MPM also participated in the latest Oncorus financing, which included participation from other earlier investors UBS Oncology Impact Fund, Deerfield Management, Arkin Bioventures, Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG), and Astellas Venture Management. New investors in the Series B round include Surveyor Capital, Sphera Funds, IMM Investment, QUAD Investment Management, UTC Investment, SV Investment Corp., and Shinhan Investment-Private Equity.

Source. Frank Vinluan, Xconomy, August 21, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Freenome nabs $160M to advance blood-based colorectal cancer test

Investors have poured boatloads of cash into liquid biopsy companies promising that their technology is the solution for non-invasive screening of early-stage cancer.

In the latest mega funding round, South San Francisco company Freenome has raised a $160 million in a Series B led by RA Capital Management and Polaris Partners to launch its pivotal trial for its blood-based test to screen for colorectal cancer. Polaris Partners and RA Capital will join Freenome’s board as part of the deal.

Other new investors in the round include Roche Venture Fund, Kaiser Permanente Ventures and the social impact investing arm of the American Cancer Society. The company has raised a total of $238 million since its founding in 2014.

Alongside the company’s clinical validation efforts, Freenome expects to submit its test for parallel review for CMS coverage. The new capital will be directed at building the infrastructure and staffing necessary to perform the clinical trial.

Freenome’s technology analyzes patient sample taken through regular blood draw to determine the potential risk for colorectal cancer.

Through what the company dubs a “multiomics” approach, the diagnostic uses machine learning and computation to test a combination of potential biomarkers for cancer like genetic material shed from cancer cells, relevant proteins

and methylation, which is a process by which DNA modifies the function of specific genes.

"We’ve never believed there is a single solution to cancer screenings,” said Freenome CEO Gabriel Otte. “Our intention always to test for multiple analytes in the blood and use those combination of signals to effect cancer treatments.”

This information gleaned from Freenome’s test can be used to help inform provider decisions to confirm the diagnosis and start treatment earlier, leading to better recovery and survival rates.

According to the American Cancer Society, when colorectal cancer is detected in an early stage, 5-year survival rates hover around 90 percent. The condition is the second deadliest form of cancer, with around 50,000 Americans predicted to die of the condition this year.

Freenome’s strategy takes a page from Exact Sciences, which received FDA approval – along with a positive CMS coverage indication – for its Cologuard stool-based colorectal cancer diagnostic in 2014.

Frankly it’s not really about what works technologically, and not even what you can get validated by the FDA, but rather what you can get paid for,” Otte said.

Mirroring its predecessor’s approach to regulatory and reimbursement approval, Freenome is also looking to launch a similar trial to the one conducted by Exact Sciences.

Otte said Freenome plans to have pre-submission meetings with the FDA later this year and launch the clinical trial in the first half of 2020. The hope is to be able to enroll roughly 10,000 participants into the trial, with the research taking place over a period of around 24 months.

Competitors like Grail, Guardant Health and Thrive are all pursuing their own liquid biopsy technology, albeit with a focus on screening for multiple types of cancer.

Menlo Park-based Grail presented early results at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting that showed its diagnostic’s ability to detect cancer signals with a false positive rate of less than 1 percent and find the tissue of origin with relatively high accuracy.

Otte, however, drew a distinction in the business rationale between Grail’s approach and that of Freenome.

He said that Freenome’s early screening for colorectal cancer has defined clinical utility, with a standard way to confirm to diagnosis through a colonoscopy. Multi-cancer screenings – while great tools technologically – leave too much open to interpretation and are harder to integrate into the existing healthcare system, Otte argued.

“One of the most important questions to ask is what is the clinical follow-up?Clinicians are going never to use the test that leaves too many open-ended questions on what they’re going to do next and payers won’t reimburse for that either,” Otte said.

In fact, Freenome’s company’s own product development pipeline was shaped by a similar realization. Initially, the company’s research honed in on prostate cancer, but it was faced with the issue of early diagnosis failing to change treatment patterns, rendering the test non-commercially viable.

Still, even with the difference in opinion to some of the other liquid biopsy companies, Otte pointed to the growing interest in the field from investors and clinicians as positive indications for the industry.

“Diagnostics have traditionally been the ugly-step sibling in the therapeutics world, but there’s a growing recognition that next-generation diagnostics are here to stay and are a key part of solving cancer,” Otte said.

Source. Medcity News, Kevin Truong, July 24, 2019

 ***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

BioNTech raises $325M series B round to advance cancer pipeline

BioNTech has raised $325 million (€289 million) in a private fundraising round. The series B positions the immuno-oncology player to advance its multidrug clinical pipeline and grow its manufacturing footprint.

Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech operated for a decade without raising a headline-grabbing round, opting instead to run on money from its billionaire majority owners and partnership fees, such as the $310 million in upfront and near-term milestones put up by Genentech. That changed early in 2018 when BioNTech raised $270 million in a Redmile Group-led series A round.

Now, BioNTech has raised $325 million in a round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. Other existing investors including Redmile and the Struengmann Family Office contributed to the series B round, but two-thirds of the cash came from new investors.

BioNTech will use the cash to build on the work facilitated by its series A round. The company now has seven candidates in eight clinical trials. BioNTech’s most advanced assets are derived from its mRNA platform, which established it as a rival to CureVac and Moderna. But the pipeline now also features cell therapies, small molecules and immune checkpoint modulators.

The expansion and advancement of the pipeline has dialed up BioNTech’s fundraising needs. Some of the additional cash will fund studies of the candidates. Another slice will enable the expansion of BioNTech’s manufacturing capacity to support drug development and potentially commercialization.

Talking to Reuters at the time of the series A round, BioNTech identified the need to “invest enormously in manufacturing” as a key driver of its ongoing hunger for large sums of money. Reports earlier in the year suggested that BioNTech would sate that hunger with an $800 million IPO around the end of 2019. Crossover investors are among the organizations to contribute to the series B round.

In returning to private investors, BioNTech has raised one of the largest ever private biotech rounds in Europe. Immunocore raised a $320 million series A round in 2015, but few other European biotechs have raised triple-digit private rounds, let alone secured hauls of more than $300 million.

Source. FierceBioTech, Nick Paul Taylor, July 9, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax

Bayer powers Versant cell therapy startup to $250M round

Versant Ventures’ Century Therapeutics has exited stealth with $250 million to take allogeneic cell therapies into the clinic. Bayer’s VC wing led the investment with the support of Versant and Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics (FCDI).

Century, like other allogeneic cell therapy players, is trying to improve on autologous products that require the administration of a patient’s own cells back to them by creating off-the-shelf alternatives. The potential of allogeneic therapies has attracted a lot of attention—Allogene Therapeutics alone has raised more than $500 million—but Century thinks it can improve on existing approaches.

That belief rests on Century’s use of self-renewing induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Century puts these cells through multiple rounds of cellular engineering to create master cell banks. By expanding and differentiating the cells in these banks into immune effector cells, Century thinks it can supply “vast amounts” of homogeneous off-the-shelf products. Other developers of allogeneic cell therapies work with nonrenewable donor-derived cells.

Versant set Century up last year to build on the research of the biotech’s scientific cofounders, Marcela Maus, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School and Hiro Nakauchi, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University School of Medicine.

A partnership with Fujifilm subsidiary FCDI followed later in 2018, providing Century with access to an iPSC platform, immune effector cell differentiation protocols and a manufacturing service provider.  

Leaps by Bayer, the VC wing of the German life science company, has committed $215 million to enable Century to build on this platform. With the involvement of Versant and FCDI bringing the size of the round up to $250 million, Century is positioned to move multiple iPSC-derived treatments for blood cancers and solid tumors into human testing.

The pursuit of iPSC-derived cell therapies may take Century into uncharted waters. Maus is among the researchers to previously note the challenges this will entail, telling Cancer Discovery last year that “we don’t have a long safety track record of using pluripotent stem cells clinically, much less genetically manipulated ones.” Other researchers have questioned how companies will convince the FDA that their products are completely free from undifferentiated stem cells. 

Century is well equipped to try to overcome these hurdles. As well as raising $250 million, Century has put together a leadership team with deep experience in immuno-oncology and cell therapies.

Ex-Juno Therapeutics CSO Hyam Levitsky, M.D., has taken up the post of president of R&D at Century. Luis Borges, Ph.D., an ex-Amgen scientist who spent the past two years at Cell Medica, has come on board as CSO. And longtime Celgene and Roche employee Adrienne Farid, Ph.D., has arrived as chief development officer. This team will be led by Lalo Flores, Ph.D., who helped to guide Versant’s Novira Therapeutics to a takeover by Johnson & Johnson in 2015.

Source. FierceBiotech, Nick Paul Taylor, July 1, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

BioEclipse Therapeutics Raises $7.7M in Series A-1 Financing

BioEclipse Therapeutics, a South San Francisco-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, raised $7.7m in Series A-1 financing.

The round, which brought total funding raised to date to $9.3m, was led by Revelis Capital Group, with participation from Tsingyuan Ventures, DEFTA Partners, TSVC (TEEC Angel Fund) and Plum Alley.

The company intends to use the funds to advance lead immunotherapy, CRX-100, into Phase 1b/2a clinical trials in therapy-refractory solid tumors.

Led by Pamela Contag, Ph.D., founder and CEO, BioEclipse Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company committed to delivering curative immuno-oncology therapeutics to patients with cancer. The company is preparing to initiate Phase 1b/2a clinical trials with, CRX-100, a patented, first in class, intravenously delivered, targeted immunotherapy against solid tumors. CRX-100, is being developed to deliver potentially curative treatment to patients over a broad range of tumor types, including some rare pediatric cancers.

BioEclipse also announced the addition of three new board members:

– Mark Frohlich, MD, former Executive Vice President at Juno Therapeutics;

– Elona Baum, Managing Director of DEFTA Partners; and

– Oliver Hopkinson, Co-Founder and Manager of Revelis Capital Group.

Source. FinSMEs, June 24, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax