- NextVivo — a biotech company developing an immune organoid technology platform — emerged from stealth recently with $7.9 million in financing. These are the details.
NextVivo — a biotech company developing an immune organoid technology platform — emerged from stealth recently with $7.9 million in financing led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alexandria Venture Investments, Wilson Sonsini, and individual investors. Co-founded by Drs. Mark Davis, Calvin Kuo, and Adam Margolin, NextVivo plans to develop the first organoid platform able to generate and test therapies in immune-competent human-derived models.
NextVivo organoids are miniature 3D tissue models that can uniquely retain all key cell types of human organs, including immune cells. And the consequent recapitulation of functional interactions between organs and immune cells across a variety of healthy and disease tissue types enables the generation of candidate therapies by leveraging the immune system’s natural defenses. Further, the effectiveness of immune-based therapies can be tested in these human disease replicas without placing patients at risk.
The company’s platform – based on technology licensed from Stanford University – has potential applications to generate cell and antibody therapies by leveraging the immune system’s natural defense mechanisms and to pre-clinical and clinical testing of drug candidates across a range of diseases, including cancer, infection and autoimmune disorders. And NextVivo’s technology overcomes critical barriers that have prevented other organoids from growing physiologically relevant models of disease by limiting the represented cell types.
And the company’s organoids provide 3D holistic models that recapitulate the spatial organization and functional interactions among healthy, disease, and immune cells, opening the door to new ways of conducting drug development in fully human systems.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our platform has the potential to enhance each step of drug development by applying organoid models that recapitulate key aspects of the human immune system outside of the body. The funding will allow us to advance our platform to generate novel drug candidates using the same processes through which our immune system continuously eradicates would-be disease cells in our bodies, and to bring the most effective therapies to patients by safely testing them on human disease tissue.”
— Dr. Adam Margolin, CEO of NextVivo
“At Khosla Ventures, we invest in ventures that are early, bold and impactful for the world. We are excited to have incubated NextVivo and look forward to building an organoid platform that will accelerate the future development of safer and more effective therapies for patients.”
— Vinod Khosla, Managing Partner at Khosla Ventures
