BOSTON— GentiBio, Inc., a biotherapeutics company developing engineered regulatory T cells (Tregs) therapies for immunology, today announced it has closed on a Series A financing generating immediate proceeds of $157 million, led by Matrix Capital Management with participation by Avidity Partners, JDRF T1D Fund, seed investors OrbiMed, RA Capital Management, and Novartis Venture Fund, and Seattle Children’s Research Institute. The company’s unique platform aspires to functionally cure autoimmune, alloimmune, autoinflammatory, and allergic diseases using novel technologies that precisely redirect stable, potent engineered Tregs to tissues damaged by abnormal immune responses. GentiBio, leveraging its highly differentiated platform, is able to create multiple, tunable Treg phenotypes from more abundant autologous and allogeneic cell sources that can be manufactured at scale. GentiBio has raised $177 million since 2020 to transcend technical hurdles that have limited the potential of therapeutic Tregs.
“Tregs play a vital role in controlling immune responses but are a rare and heterogenous population that is challenging to isolate and purify at scale,” said Adel Nada, M.D., M.S., President and Chief Executive Officer of GentiBio. “GentiBio engineered Tregs created from abundant autologous and allogeneic T cell sources have the potential to overcome scalability and phenotypic inconsistency issues that are intrinsic to Tregs sorted from peripheral blood. With the Series A financing, we are focused on advancing our programs with a uniquely scalable manufacturing process that produces stable and disease specific engineered Tregs that are also tunable once infused in patients.”
The Series A financing will enable GentiBio to advance its potential functional cure for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) to the clinic alongside multiple other pipeline programs in chronic autoimmunity and autoinflammation. GentiBio is currently selecting its clinical candidate for T1D and will begin IND-enabling studies before the end of the year.
“At Matrix Capital, we are thrilled to support GentiBio’s mission to develop and scale the next generation of curative cell therapies for patients suffering from autoimmune diseases. We are excited by the Company’s preclinical results demonstrating the broad therapeutic potential of its platform to engineer best-in-class Tregs,” said Andy Tran, the incoming Board Director from Matrix Capital Management. “GentiBio’s novel engineering platform has tremendous promise to bring forward durable Treg treatments for a broad array of devastating autoimmune diseases and has the unique ability to scale them cost-effectively for patients.”
GentiBio launched in August 2020 with $20 million seed funding from OrbiMed, Novartis Venture Fund and RA Capital.
