- Prokarium recently announced it raised $30 million. These are the details.
Prokarium – a biopharmaceutical company leading the oncology field of microbial immunotherapy – announced it has raised $30 million in new funding. This funding round follows Prokarium’s announcement of partnering with Ginkgo Bioworks to leverage its world-class Foundry and extensive Codebase to develop a bactofection platform technology.
Prokarium’s lead program has the potential to transform the treatment paradigm in bladder cancer, one of the costliest cancers to treat, in its efforts to become the new standard-of-care in a market that has seen little innovation in over 30 years and to offer advanced therapies an alternative to Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG). And Prokarium’s pipeline leverages evolutionary advantages of a proprietary strain of Salmonella and combines them with bespoke synthetic circuits to deliver diverse therapeutic cargo for difficult-to-treat cancers.
Along with the financing, Prokarium has announced the addition of two scientific advisors, Professor Adrian Hayday, PhD and Sam Chang, MD, MBA. Professor Hayday is the founding Chair of Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at King’s College London and is currently Principal Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. And Sam currently serves as the Chief Surgical Officer at the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are excited to advance our vision to create living cures. Proceeds of this financing will fund our lead oncology program entering clinical development this year and enable platform expansion for the delivery of novel therapeutic payloads, including RNA, via our proprietary bacteria. With Ginkgo’s partnership and their expertise in strain engineering and optimization we look forward to working towards unlocking a new generation of immuno-oncology therapeutics.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Adrian and Sam as advisors as we transition into a clinical-stage company, Adrian brings the deep immunology and immunotherapy expertise, and Sam possesses invaluable clinical experience being involved in numerous bladder cancer clinical trials.”
— Kristen Albright, PharmD, Chief Executive Officer of Prokarium
