ImmuneBridge – a biotechnology company using nature’s innate intelligence to fight cancer – announced the closing of an oversubscribed $12 million seed financing co-led by global investors Insight Partners and M Ventures (strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck). One Way Ventures and Gaingels also participated in the funding round. In conjunction with the funding, Cheryl Zimberlin, Investment Director at M Ventures, and Dylan Morris, Managing Director at Insight Partners have joined the company’s Board of Directors.
ImmuneBridge is developing allogeneic natural killer (NK) cell-based immunotherapies for hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. And NK cells represent a promising platform for allogeneic immunotherapy because they are potent cancer killers with a minimal risk profile. The current approaches to NK therapeutic development have yet to identify optimal product attributes with regard to source, phenotype, and engineering that yield the most effective and durable therapies.
The company’s orthogonal approach uses a proprietary expansion technology and a diverse clinic-ready source to enable accelerated discovery and translation of the most potent cell therapies. And ImmuneBridge’s expansion technology expands hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which are natural precursors of NK cells.
HSCs are readily available via umbilical cord blood from public cord blood banks across the United States and globally. And this approach allows for the systematic screening of cord blood to identify the most potent cells per indication, which then can be genetically engineered to enhance their potency on top of their innate baseline.
The investment will be used to build a screening dataset for indication-optimized NK cells, to demonstrate scalable manufacturability, and to generate pre-clinical data for a lead product.
Earlier this year, ImmuneBridge engaged key advisors, including Catherine Blish, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine and Aharon Freud, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at Ohio State University as part of ImmuneBridge’s Scientific Advisory Board.
KEY QUOTES:
“Cell therapy is a new pillar of medicine and is inextricably human. Cell therapy developers fear donor-to-donor variability, yet we humans are unapologetically diverse in our innate immune systems. It is natural to identify the most potent therapies from among human diversity—and we can employ genetic engineering to enhance them. We dare to not fear our immunological diversity but to embrace it.”
— Peretz Partensky, co-founder and CEO of ImmuneBridge
“After surveying the broader landscape, we believe ImmuneBridge is uniquely positioned to build the next generation of off-the-shelf NK cell therapies. They have a distinct and promising approach to overcome challenges faced by existing therapies.”
— Cheryl Zimberlin, Investment Director at M Ventures
“By taking advantage of the genotypic diversity of the human immune system, ImmuneBridge has the potential to dramatically improve the way we approach off-the-shelf immunotherapies.”
— Dylan Morris, Managing Director at Insight Partners.
