Cell therapy weekly: ImmuneBridge raises US$12 million in seed financing
This week: ImmuneBridge has raised US$12 million in seed financing, CANbridge Pharmaceuticals has announced it will present data on its AAV gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy at the ASGCT Annual Meeting and the US FDA’s Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee will meet to review the biologics license application for a Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy.
The news highlights:
ImmuneBridge raises US$12 million in seed financing
ImmuneBridge (CA, USA), a company developing allogeneic natural killer (NK) cell-based immunotherapies, has announced the close of a seed financing round co-led by Insight Partners (NY, USA) and M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital fund of Merck (NJ, USA). ImmuneBridge raised US$12 million in this round of financing, which will be utilized to build a screening dataset for indication-optimized NK cells, demonstrate scalable manufacturability and generate pre-clinical data for a lead product.
“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,” said Peretz Partensky, co-founder and CEO of ImmuneBridge. “We dare to not fear our immunological diversity but to embrace it.”
CANbridge Pharmaceuticals to present data on AAV gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy at ASGCT Annual Meeting
CANbridge Pharmaceuticals (Bejing, China) announced that its abstract titled ‘Low-dose intracerebroventricular delivery of a second-generation AAV gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy achieves efficient and toxicity-free motor function rescue in mice’ has been accepted for presentation at the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Meeting (16-20 May; Los Angeles, CA, USA).
US FDA to meet regarding biologics license application for Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene therapy
A date has been announced for the meeting of the US FDA’s Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee regarding the biologics license application for SRP-9001 (delandistrogene moxeparvovec). SRP-9001 is an investigational gene therapy for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy from Sarepta Therapeutics (OR, USA).
“We look forward to sharing the wealth of evidence supporting the transformative potential of SRP-9001 for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy with the advisory committee on May 12, 2023,” said Doug Ingram, President and CEO of Sarepta. “We would again like to thank Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and the Office of Therapeutic Products for working swiftly to schedule the advisory committee in advance of our regulatory action date of May 29, 2023.”