US biopharmaceutical company Adicet Bio Inc. has raised $80 million in a Series B financing round. The money was raised from new investors including Marius Nacht and Dr. Yair Schindel's aMoon2 Fund. Dr. Schindel joins Adicet's board. Other new investors in the round were Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, OCI Enterprises, KB Investment, Consensus Business Group, SBI JI Innovation Fund, Samsung Venture Investment Corp, Handok, and DSC Investment. All existing investors including OrbiMed, Novartis Venture Fund and Pontifax also participated in the financing.
Based on technology developed by Prof. Yoram Reiter at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Adicet Bio is developing allogeneic cell therapies for cancer using innovative gamma delta T cells.
aMoon head of sourcing Dr. Nurit Tweezer Zaks, who leds the investment on behalf of aMoon said, "In recent years CAR-T has made a revolution in the field of cancer. The principsal is that the cells in the immune system of the patient are tired and weak but if we take them out of the patient, and proliferate them in the laboratory in order to increase their magnitude very greatly and then put them back in the body, what we lack in quality we will have in quantity."
She added, "To this we can add a broad range of improvements like cell engineering to improve the ability to reach the target (as did Kyte Pharma, which was acquired by Gilead Pharmaceuticals for over $11 billion), characteristics that cause the cell only to work in a certain region, switches that facilitate operating or turning off the cell according to the area in which it is located, and more.
Adicet Bio CEO Dr. Anil Singhal said, "Gamma delta T cells are a highly promising, emerging modality for treating cancer. This financing will permit Adicet to continue to develop our proprietary technology, to enter the clinic in Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and to advance our solid tumor programs."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 3, 2019
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2019