ArsenalBio bags $325 million to develop CRISPR-engineered cell therapies
The round featured new investors such as ARCH Venture Partners, Milky Way Investments Group, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures, and Regeneron’s new venture capital fund Regeneron Ventures.
ArsenalBio will use the proceeds to develop its lead programs for the treatment of solid tumors including kidney and prostate cancer. The cash will also be used to design tools for the development of other cell therapy candidates.
The first CAR-T cell therapy, Novartis’ Kymriah, entered the market in 2017 for the treatment of forms of blood cancer and increasing numbers of products have joined the fray since then. However, solid tumors remain a challenge for T cell therapies, with one limitation being that the cancers have a microenvironment that suppresses the immune response.
To tackle this problem, ArsenalBio is deploying synthetic biology and automation to engineer T cell therapies that are more potent and selective than current therapies in addition to more resistant to the tumor’s attempts to evade the immune system.
For example, the startup is using an approach based on the gene editing tool CRISPR to make its T cells trigger the production of cancer-hunting CAR proteins when they are at a tumor rather than all the time as with current therapies. By doing this, the startup aims to stop the T cells from becoming exhausted as quickly as normal. Additionally, the company delivers the gene editing machinery into its T cells without needing a viral vector which may result in fewer off-target edits.
“Our initial clinical trials and preclinical studies have shown the promise of our T cell engineering approach and have given us the confidence to broaden the application of our technology to address additional cancer types,” said ArsenalBio’s co-founder, CEO and chairman Ken Drazan in a public statement. “This new investment enables us to continue our development roadmap, scale up our manufacturing capabilities, and invest in new avenues for innovation in T cell medicine.”
ArsenalBio launched with a hefty $85 million Series A round in 2019 and followed up with a $220 million B round in 2022 with the aim to take its lead candidate cell therapy AB-1015 into phase 1 testing for the treatment of ovarian cancer.
As of this round, ArsenalBio has also advanced its second candidate into a phase 1/2 trial for the treatment of clear-cell renal cell carcinoma. The firm is also developing therapies for solid tumors in a collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) dating back to 2020.
ArsenalBio’s huge financing round is one of the largest in the cell and gene therapy space this year, with other examples including Obsidian Therapeutics’ $160.5 million Series C round in April and ophthalmology specialist Beacon Therapeutics’ $170 million Series B round in July.
