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ArsenalBio's approach will move beyond the current model of tumor-targeting strategies to allow the rewiring of immune cell circuitry through computationally driven design. The company aspires to evolve critical metrics of success for immune cell therapies, including enhanced and broader efficacy, increased patient safety, reduced provider costs, and expanded market access.
Fremont, CA: ArsenalBio made its debut with a USD 85 million Series A funding round, with investments from Westlake Village BioPartners, The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Kleiner Perkins, The University of California San Francisco Foundation Investment Company, Euclidean Capital, and Osage Venture Partners. This funding will help kick start the programmable cell therapy company to create highly effective and accessible immune cell therapies. The company will be integrating technologies like CRISPR-based genome engineering, scaled and high throughput target identification, synthetic biology, and machine learning to advance a new paradigm, which will help discover and develop immune cell therapies, initially for cancer. ArsenalBio's foundation stems from the contributions of scientific leaders from a consortium of academic medical and research institutions.
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"Our goal is to address the unmet need and suffering of patients with cancer, and ultimately other diseases, by developing and advancing a new paradigm of human immune cell therapy design and treatment," said Ken Drazan, MD, ArsenalBio's founding Chief Executive Officer. "The integrated technology approach we're embarking upon will create a new arsenal of tools and medicines for researchers, patients, and their physicians to reduce cancer morbidity and mortality."
Currently, first-generation T cell therapies are designed and manufactured to insert a single cell targeting transgene into a T cell, a chimeric antigen receptor, or a new T cell receptor through viral delivery. ArsenalBio looks to exponentially advance this process by precisely inserting significantly larger DNA payloads designed with proprietary tools, without the use of viral vectors. The payloads will be encoded with a broader set of biological software instructions to enable cells to target and destroy solid organ and hematologic cancers effectively. This approach will move beyond the current model of tumor-targeting strategies to allow the rewiring of immune cell circuitry through computationally driven design. The company aspires to evolve critical metrics of success for immune cell therapies, including enhanced and broader efficacy, increased patient safety, reduced provider costs, and expanded market access.
"The technology ArsenalBio is developing represents a significant advance in how cancer could be treated. The experienced leaders such as Jane Grogan, Michael Kalos, and Tarjei Mikkelsen bring, combined with Dr. Drazan's results-oriented management approach, will help rapidly advance this transformational platform to benefit patients," added Beth Seidenberg, MD, co-founding Managing Director of Westlake Village BioPartners, a Los Angeles area-based venture capital firm focused on incubating and building life sciences companies.
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