OverT Bio (a data-driven company working to unlock the curative potential of cell therapies in solid tumors) has raised $16 million in seed funding. This funding round was co-led by ARTIS Ventures and Wing VC, with participation from Fusion Fund, OMX Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, Gaingels, Civilization Ventures, Hawktail, and Cancer Research Institute. This funding round will expand discovery platforms focused on addressing the primary barriers to cell therapy, leading to durable and curative treatments for advanced solid tumors.
OverT is the first to use patients’ immune response to cancer to find new receptors and targets that can be applied across the human population. And the team searches the entire human genome to find new ways to make cell therapies more durable and capable of destroying cancers. This foundational science has been featured in leading scientific and medical journals like Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine.
OverT Bio combines cell engineering technologies with big data approaches to address major unmet medical needs in solid tumors. It has also developed unique massively parallel genetic screening, single-cell multi-omic, and synthetic biology platforms to build next-generation cell therapies. OverT’s core platform searches every gene in the genome and identifies the best genetic modifications to endow immune cells with novel properties. The company also built a similarly high-throughput approach to discovering new receptors and targets that are both safe and efficacious.
Utilizing decades of experience in cell therapy and immunology, OverT’s founding team has built a large intellectual property portfolio encompassing multiple discovery platforms and preclinical assets. Co-founder and CEO Dr. Mat Legut is an immunologist and entrepreneur with a track record of translating discoveries into clinical products. Co-founder Dr. Neville Sanjana is a faculty member at the New York Genome Center and NYU and a pioneer in CRISPR and high-throughput functional genomics.
KEY QUOTES:
“Cell therapies have shown, at least in blood cancers, that we can aim to completely cure patients that have even the most advanced diseases rather than just prolong their survival. With OverT’s ability to rapidly screen and engineer thousands of genes, we are building next-generation therapies to cure advanced cancers of the solid tissues.”
– Dr. Mat Legut, co-founder and CEO of OverT
“The OverT team is supercharging cell therapies and finding new cures for cancer. They’re a company that thinks differently and is guided by cutting-edge science – new ways to reprogram T cells, a new class of safe and broadly cancer-specific receptors often ignored by most immunologists. We look forward to supporting the team as they explore the edges of what’s possible in biotech.”
– Sara Choi, partner at Wing VC
“Everything OverT does is based on a patient-centric mission and focused on developing therapies that extend and enhance the lives of cancer patients. OverT’s approaches to modifying cell behavior and for receptor discovery are highly differentiated from everything else out there. Instead of making incremental tweaks to existing therapies, OverT is making bold bets on how to create truly transformative cell therapies.”
– Dr. Vasudev Bailey, partner at ARTIS Ventures
