Shinobi Therapeutics – a biotechnology company developing a new class of immune evasive iPS-T cell therapies – recently announced that it has closed a $51 million Series A financing. The oversubscribed funding round was led by EQT Life Sciences, F-Prime Capital, and Eight Roads Ventures Japan, with participation from Astellas Venture Management, Fast Track Initiative (FTI), JIC Venture Growth Investments, and D3 LLC.
Shinobi will use the funding round to advance its ‘Katana’ iPS-T cell therapy platform and progress its first program to treat GPC3+ solid tumor cancers toward the clinic.
Cell therapies have shown a lot of promise in treating blood cancers and other intractable diseases, but manufacturing costs render these therapies inaccessible to many patients worldwide. And off-the-shelf cell therapies offer a more scalable manufacturing approach but face the additional challenge of allo-rejection, as patients’ immune systems reject donor-derived and engineered cells as foreign invaders.
To overcome this immune response, patients now receive immunosuppressive drugs before treatment, which can often result in unwanted side effects and serious complications. Shinobi is taking a different approach by creating therapies that work with, not against, the patient’s immune system.
Shinobi’s unique approach utilizes methods developed by scientific co-founders Tobias Deuse, M.D. and Shin Kaneko, M.D., Ph.D., to first edit iPSCs to become highly immune evasive before they are differentiated with the company’s proprietary Katana technology to create CD8αβ iPS-T cells.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re thrilled to launch Shinobi out of stealth with a clear mission to develop an all-in-one solution to address some of the biggest challenges facing the cell therapy space today. Having led several cell therapy programs at other global companies, I’ve never encountered a technology platform that is capable of advancing the field as dramatically as this.”
– Dan Kemp, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Shinobi
“Shinobi’s Katana platform has the potential to make CAR-T cell therapies accessible to patients on a global scale.”
– Carl June, M.D., who has been appointed to Shinobi’s Scientific Advisory Board
“Shinobi stands alone in the growing cell therapy field by engineering the most comprehensive immune evasion technology directly into its cell products. With our colleagues at Eight Roads Ventures Japan and Donald Payan M.D., we envisioned combining the decade’s worth of iPSC research pioneered by Shin Kaneko M.D., Ph.D and developed by Yasumichi Hitoshi M.D., Ph.D. and Ryosuke Gonotsubo in Kyoto, Japan, with breakthrough immune evasion technology created by Tobias Deuse, M.D. in San Francisco. Shinobi Therapeutics is the result of these merged technologies, which delivers an allogeneic platform that effectively protects cell therapies from T cells, innate immune cells, as well as antibody-mediated immune rejection.”
– Robert Weisskoff, Ph.D, Partner at F-Prime Capital
“The full potential of allogeneic cell therapies will likely never be realized without overcoming the challenge of allo-rejection. Shinobi’s hypoimmune technology opens the door to a broader pipeline of off-the-shelf cell therapies far beyond T cells and oncology. We’re planning to leverage this platform in important areas of regenerative medicine and autoimmune disease.”
– Fouad Azzam, Ph.D., Partner at EQT Life Sciences
