Seattle and South San-Francisco based preclinical biotech company Sonoma Biotherapeutics has raised $265 million in new funding, the company announced Wednesday.
The funding will be used to advance its programs aiming to treat autoimmune and inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes.
The company’s approach involves engineering a special type of immune cell, a regulatory T cell, to enhance its therapeutic potential. Such cells can quell an overactive immune system, thereby easing symptoms of disease. By adding in a CAR (chimeric antigen receptor), researchers can also help target the cells to the right location in the body.
The company’s most advanced regulatory CAR T cell product is being developed to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis that does not respond to current therapies. Sonoma also has a program investigating a biologic agent for type 1 diabetes. That agent could potentially be used by itself or with the company’s engineered regulatory T cells.
The funds will be used to advance these two programs towards clinical trial and to develop other potential therapies against type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions such as Crohn’s disease.
“The idea is that we are taking cells out of the body of patients, and we’re manipulating them and putting back into the patients,” said CEO and president Jeff Bluestone, in a video, “So the cells become a therapy, they become the medicine.”
Bluestone was previously head of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and founded the company in 2019 along with several other immune cell researchers: Alexander Rudensky, Fred Ramsdell, and Qizhi Tang.
Harnessing regulatory T cells as therapies has for years been studied in academic labs but lately the concept has formed the basis for several startups. Brisbane, California-based Sangamo Therapeutics is expected to launch a clinical trial later this year testing regulatory CAR T cell for kidney transplants, according to a report in Nature.
Other startups in the field include Boston-based Gentibio, which has a Seattle presence. Co-founders of Gentibio include Seattle Children’s Research Institute scientist David Rawlings, Jane Buckner, president of Seattle’s Benaroya Research Institute and Andrew Scharenberg, CEO of Seattle-based cell therapy company Umoja Biopharma.
The new, oversubscribed, Series B round at Sonoma builds on two previous Series A rounds which together raised $70 million.The new round is led by Ally Bridge Group. Other investors from this round include GV, ARCH Venture Partners, Casdin Capital, Vertex Ventures HC, 8 VC, Frazier Healthcare Partners, and JDRF T1D, a disease-focused venture philanthropy fund.
from GeekWire https://www.geekwire.com/2021/sonoma-biotherapeutics-raises-265m-advance-therapies-autoimmune-inflammatory-diseases/