US-based immunology therapy developer GentiBio has completed a $157m series A round featuring pharmaceutical firm Novartis, which invested through its Novartis Venture Fund.
Investment manager Matrix Capital Management led the round, which included 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 series A proceeds will fund preclinical work on a potential treatment for type 1 diabetes, for which the company 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 had previously co-led the company’s $20m seed round in August 2020 with OrbiMed and RA Capital Management.
