Xfund is among the backers of a $17m round for ImmuneID, which has been set up to commercialise research from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University.
ImmuneID, a US-based precision immunology company based on Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University research, has launched with $17m in funding from investors including Harvard-aligned venture capital firm Xfund.
Longwood Fund led the round, which also included Arch Venture Partners, Pitango HealthTech and In-Q-Tel, the investment affiliate of the US intelligence community, as well as unnamed investors.
ImmuneID is working on a platform that exploits sequencing, robotic automation and artificial intelligence to identify treatments for conditions linked to the immune system, such as severe allergy, autoimmunity, oncology and infectious disease.
The scientific co-founders are Stephen Elledge, the Gregor Mendel professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School, Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Tomasz Kula of the Harvard Society of Fellows as well as H Benjamin Larman, assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins.
The funding will allow ImmuneID to develop therapeutic programmes in a range of areas.
Elledge said: “High-quality therapeutic target identification has remained a vexing bottleneck in drug discovery.
“The ImmuneID platform, including the VirScan technology, relieves this bottleneck by using its massively parallel, multiplexed, and unbiased approach to provide previously unavailable insight into human immune responses throughout the course of disease progression.”
