As colleagues at Seattle Childrens Hospital, Andy Scharenberg, M.D., and Michael Jensen, M.D., knew they wanted to build a startup with a mission.

Although cell therapies like Novartis Kymriah and Gileads Yescarta have transformed treatment for certain blood cancers, Scharenberg, a pediatric immunologist by training, was struck by the numbers of patients who cant get those treatments.

I wanted to create something where the impact would be absolutely the biggest possible swing you could take, he said.

That was the driving force behind the pairs decision to found Seattle-based Umoja Biopharma, which debuted Tuesday with a $53 million series A round. Scharenberg envisions Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, as a unification of three approaches developed by scientists at Seattle Childrens and Purdue University.

Umojas multipronged approach relies on three platforms used in sequence.

We're going to give you a first medicine that's going to grow a cancer-fighting cell army in your body, and then we're going to send that cancer-fighting army in your body messages telling it how to kill off your tumor, Scharenberg said.

That first medicine is VivoVec, which generates cancer-fighting CAR-T-cells inside the body, boosting the immune system. This approach is different to that of current treatments Kymriah and Yescarta, which require T cells to be extracted from patients, engineered outside the bodyand then given back to the patient to fight cancer. VivoVec doesnt need pre-conditioninga treatment used to clear a path for cell therapies to work but that tends to suppress the immune systemand it mimics the bodys own immune response, reducing the risk of cytokine release syndrome, a common side effect of CAR-T treatments.

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After two weeks to allow for the number of T-cells to expand in the body, the patient would then receiveTumorTag, which binds to both tumor cells and the shields they use to hide from the bodys natural immune defenses. As its name suggests, the technology tags them as targets for the newly created army of T-cells.

Finally, the patient would receive RACR/CAR, which doctors can use to tune the activity of the engineered T cells in the body with the help of FDA-approved drugs. One of those drugs is rapamycin, an immunosuppressant.

Originally posted here:
Umoja banks $53M to develop triple-threat immunotherapies - FierceBiotech