Matrix Capital Management led the immunology drug developer's series A round, which will support the journey of a type 1 diabetes drug candidate towards the clinic.
GentiBio, a US-based developer of immunology therapies based on findings from several research centres, has completed a $157m series A round led by investment manager Matrix Capital Management.
The round included pharmaceutical firm Novartis, which invested through its Novartis Venture Fund, as well as Avidity Partners, JDRF T1D Fund, OrbiMed, RA Capital Management and Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
GentiBio is engineering specialised regulatory T cells (Tregs) that will form the basis of therapeutics for autoimmune, alloimmune, autoinflammatory and allergic diseases where tissue has been damaged by abnormal immune responses.
The company’s scientific co-founders include David Rawlings, director at the Center for Immunity and Immunotherapies at Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Research Institute and part of University of Washington School of Medicine’s Department of Immunology.
Gideon Gross, head of Migal Galilee Research Institute’s immunology lab, is also among the co-founders, as is Jane Buckner, president of Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason hospital.
The series A proceeds will fund preclinical work on a potential treatment for type 1 diabetes, for which GentiBio aims to begin Investigational New Drug-enabling studies later this year.
Adel Nada, GentiBio’s president and CEO, said: “Tregs play a vital role in controlling immune responses but are a rare and heterogenous population that is challenging to isolate and purify at scale.
“GentiBio engineered Tregs created from abundant autologous and allogeneic T cell sources have the potential to overcome scalability and phenotypic inconsistency issues that are intrinsic to Tregs sorted from peripheral blood.
“With the series A financing, we are focused on advancing our programmes with a uniquely scalable manufacturing process that produces stable and disease specific engineered Tregs that are also tuneable once infused in patients.”
Novartis Venture Fund, OrbiMed and RA Capital Management had previously co-led the company’s $20m seed round in August 2020.
