Headquartered in New Jersey, Tevogen’s next generation precision T cell platform is designed to provide increased target specificity to eliminate malignant and viral infected cells, while allowing healthy cells to remain intact. The company believes its platform could offer several advantages of CAR-T.
The investment from New Jersey’s HMP Partners – an investment firm managed by doctors – will allow Tevogen to expedite expansion of its development pipeline: in particular of its lead candidate TVGN-489, a COVID-19-specific CD8+ T lymphocyte investigational product which is in a proof-of-concept trial.
Off-the-shelf therapy
Tevogen says its tech is designed to allow development of unmodified T cell therapeutics from a single donor to treat hundreds of patients sharing the same human leukocyte antigen (HLA) type, without the need for specialized medical facilities.
It believes that this 'off-the-shelf' convenience will make it possible to develop T cell therapies with greater convenience, unprecedented speed, and at a much lower cost than currently available platforms, such as CAR-T. This would make it well suited to targeting common life-threatening cancers and viral infections.
The investment will support accelerated development of lead candidate TVGN-489: a highly purified product designed to detect proteins that are spread across the entire viral genome and found across COVID-19 variants. In addition, TVGN-489 is designed not to be susceptible to spike mutations as the targets are selected from the entire genome.
Tevogen believes that therapeutic approaches to date have not harnessed CD8+ Cytotoxic T-Lymphocytes – ‘killer T cells’ - to their full potential for clinical application. Currently available approaches include both genetically unmodified T cells applied to the treatment of viruses early after transplant and genetically modified CAR-T cells used to treat a selected subset of malignancies.
Tevogen also secured funding from HMP Partners in January 2021 to support earlier trials of TVGN-489.
Tevogen CEO Ryan Saadi, M.D., M.P.H., said, “We are excited to continue to partner with this exceptional group of investors who, as medical experts, are keenly in tune with what we see as the vast potential of personalized CD8+ Cytotoxic T lymphocytes for therapeutic purposes.
"The Tevogen team has developed an innovative technology that we believe will enable development of affordable T cell therapies for millions of patients suffering from cancers and viral infections, and we are gratified that HMP Partners has invested again.”
Hema Patel, managing partner of HMP Partners, added: “We are excited to make another investment in Tevogen’s ingenuity and are hopeful Tevogen’s novel business model built on bringing life-saving therapies to large patient populations will become the gold standard in the biopharma industry and usher in a new frontier of medicine.
"We believe Tevogen has significant potential, and based on a discounted cash flow analysis, think the company’s valuation even today could be in excess of $5bn.”