San Francisco-based ImmuneBridge has announced a pivotal expansion: the company’s cell therapy screening and manufacturing platform, previously used only for its internal pipeline, will now be accessible to external therapeutic co-development partners.
Supporting this move is a second seed round of $7.7M USD, bringing total funding to nearly $20M USD.
The platform is built around two core innovations: a world-first disease-specific donor screening system that uses machine learning to identify the most effective immune cell donors for a particular condition, and a proprietary small molecule that preserves stem cell pluripotency – the capacity of immune stem cells to differentiate into any immune cell type even after multiple rounds of replication.
This allows the company to produce thousands of therapeutic doses from a single donor – a dramatic improvement over competing approaches that can achieve only tens of doses per donor at most.
Large-scale cell therapy manufacturing has long been hindered by two compounding problems: donor cells vary widely in quality and effectiveness, making affordable high-throughput screening difficult, and stem cells cultured in the lab frequently lose the pluripotency needed to develop into functional immune cells of any lineage.
ImmuneBridge’s platform tackles both simultaneously – and now, the company is making it available to partners ranging from small biotech startups to established pharmaceutical companies.
Courtesy of ImmuneBridge
The new funding will support both the advancement of ImmuneBridge’s internal pipeline and the buildout of its partnership program, which the company expects will result in several new therapies across multiple distinct cell types advancing toward the clinic over the next two years.
Beyond T cells and NK cells – which are used to treat cancer, autoimmune disorders and viral infections, among others – the platform enables manufacturing of macrophages, which may reduce mortality due to liver fibrosis, as well as neutrophil therapies being explored for patients with severe infections and stem cells for immunodeficient patients. Established manufacturing methods do not yet exist for these later ones.
The funding round was led by NFX and backed by One Way Ventures, M Ventures, Insight Partners, LongGame Ventures, T.Rx Capital, Healthspan Capital, Sand Hill Angels, and two independent investors. The investment marks LongGame Ventures’ largest check to date.
Dr. Rober Langer, institute professor at MIT and Executive Chairman of T.Rx Capital, noted: “Every emerging field matures by strengthening its foundation. In cell therapy, that foundation is manufacturing.”
The company also announced the appointment of Dr. Nina Horowitz as CEO, promoted from Chief Scientific Officer after building the startup’s donor screening platform from the ground up following her PhD from Stanford. Her path to the role is a personal one – a childhood cancer scare set her on a lifelong mission to fight the disease.
Rui Tostoes, PhD, was named Chief Technology Officer, bringing a career spent designing and validating cell therapy manufacturing systems:
“At ImmuneBridge, we’re finally aligning the biology with the engineering,” he said, “and we’re seeing true scalability as a result.”
The company is currently partnering with more than a dozen organizations, and is targeting ten therapies in the clinic over the next ten years. Animal efficacy data is expected this year, and initial human trials are set for 2028.
Featured image: ImmuneBridge
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.
