US-based biotechnology company Pandion Therapeutics raised $58m in a series A round on Thursday from a consortium co-led by Roche Venture Fund, the investment unit of pharmaceutical firm Roche.
Polaris Partners and Versant Ventures co-led the round, which also featured SR One, the corporate venturing division of pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline, and BioInnovation Capital also participated.
Pandion is developing bispecific antibody therapeutics that are able to restore immune functionality and target specific tissue, avoiding the systemic immunosuppression required by current autoimmune diseases treatments and transplant drugs.
The company’s pipeline includes treatments for inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune liver disease, kidney diseases, type 1 diabetes and autoimmune skin conditions. The platform also has applications in immuno-oncology.
The money will allow Pandion to advance its treatments for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases into the clinic and to further develop its platform and pipeline.
Mitchell Mutz, investment director at Roche Venture Fund, Vikas Goyal, principal at SR One, and Carlo Rizzuto, partner at Versant, will join the board of directors.
Pandion has also appointed Anthony Coyle as CEO and Jo Viney as chief scientific officer. Coyle was previously a senior vice-president (VP) at pharmaceutical firm Pfizer, while Viney was previously VP of drug discovery and VP of immunology research at biotech firm Biogen.
Coyle and Viney co-founded Pandion with David Sachs, director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center Laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital, emeritus professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and professor of surgery at Columbia University Medical Center.
Alan Crane, partner at Polaris Partners, also co-founded the company and now serves as chairman of the board. Polaris provided an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2017.