UC Berkeley-founded genome editing technology developer Caribou Biosciences has completed its first funding round in five years.
Caribou Biosciences, a US-based gene-editing technology spinout of University of California (UC) Berkeley, closed a $115m series C round on Wednesday co-led by Farallon Capital Management, PFM Health Sciences and Ridgeback Capital Investments.
AbbVie Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of pharmaceutical firm AbbVie, and health system Heritage Medical Systems backed the round, as did cancer charity Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s philanthropic venture arm Therapy Acceleration Program.
Adage Capital Partners, Avego Bioscience Capital, Avidity Partners, Invus, Janus Henderson Investors, LifeSci Venture Partners, Monashee Investment Management, Point72, Maverick Ventures and Pontifax AgTech also joined the round together with funds managed by Tekla Capital Management.
Founded in 2011, Caribou Biosciences is working on off-the-shelf cellular immunotherapies for cancer using Crispr genome editing technology.
The spinout was co-founded by Jennifer Doudna, a professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology at UC Berkeley, and her then- postdoctoral associate Martin Jinek, who is now an assistant professor at University of Zurich.
Doudna and her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at University of Vienna and now at Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for their pioneering work in Crispr.
Their work has been the subject of a decade-long legal battle with Broad Institute. UC Berkeley’s patents are based on applications drawn from work in test tubes, while Broad’s were granted for proving that Crispr could be used for genome editing of cells from animals, humans, and plants.
Caribou will use the series C funding to further develop its platform and to advance its pipeline of potential cancer treatments. Santhosh Palani, partner at PFM, and Jeffrey Long-McGie, managing director at Ridgeback, will join Caribou’s board of directors.
AbbVie Ventures’ commitment to the round follows the signing of a collaboration and licence agreement by AbbVie and Caribou last month for the research and development of two additional, unnamed CAR-T cell therapies.
Caribou last raised funding in 2016, when financial services group Fidelity’s F-Prime Capital Partners led a $30m series B round that also attracted pharmaceutical firm Novartis, Heritage, Anterra Capital, Maverick, Mission Bay Capital, Pontifax Agtech and 5 Prime Ventures.
Novartis, Mission Bay, 5 Prime and F-Prime Capital (then known as Fidelity Biosciences) had already participated in an $11m series A round in 2015.
