Cell Therapy Company Raises $160 Million to Advance iPSC-Derived Therapies to Clinic – BioSpace

Century Therapeuticsreceived a $160 million infusion of cash to advance the companys pipeline of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapies for cancer.

This morning, the Philadelphia-based company announced a Series C financing round that will drive its preclinical pipeline, which includes multiple iPSC-derived CAR-iT and CAR-iNK cell products, into the clinic over the next 12 months. The companys assets are designed to resist host rejection, enhance cell persistence, and allow repeat dosing to provide durable responses in all patients. Century Therapeutics, which launched in 2019, anticipates clinical testing to begin in 2022 and also predicts it will generate multiple Investigational New Drug applications over the next several years.

The companysgenetically engineered, iPSC-derived iNK and iT cell products are designed to specifically target hematologic and solid tumor cancers. Centurys iPSCs, which are stem cells that can be generated from adult stem cells, have unlimited self-renewing capacity, which enables multiple rounds of cellular engineering. According to the company, these engineering rounds will produce master cell banks of modified cells that can be expanded and differentiated into immune effector cells to supply vast amounts of allogeneic and homogeneous therapeutic products. This platform differentiates Century from competitors that are developing cell therapies made from non-renewable donor-derived cells.

The Series C financing round was led by Casdin Capital and include a number of new investors, including Fidelity Management & Research LLC, the Federated HermesKauffmannFunds, RA Capital, Logos Capital, OrbiMed,Marshall Wace, Qatar Investment Authority, Avidity Partners, and Octagon Capital.Founding investorsVersant Ventures and Leaps by Bayer also participated in the latest fundraising.

We are fortunate to be surrounded by such a top-tier group of investors, whose support will enable the acceleration of Century's technology platform into the clinic, Lalo Flores, chief executive officer of Century Therapeutics said in a statement. With this new investor partnership, we are well-positioned to capitalize on the tremendous potential of our integrated iPSC, cell engineering and manufacturing capabilities to develop safer, more effective and more affordable next generation allogeneic cancer therapies.

Eli Casdin, chief investment of Casdin Capital, who joined the Century Therapeutics Board of Directors following this Series C, said he was excited to partner with the cell therapy company.

It's a remarkable and transformative time in the field, with the ability to engineer cells for therapeutic impact now a commercial reality. At the same time, iPSC technology has matured and is now leading the transition from bespoke autologous products to off-the-shelf allogeneic ones, Casdin said in a statement.

For Century Therapeutics, the financing round was announced about one month after the company expanded its capabilities with new laboratory manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In addition to thePennsylvaniaandNew Jerseylocations, Century has a laboratory inHamilton, Ontariospecifically focused on targeting glioblastoma, and recently opened aSeattle-based innovation hub to help advance the company's novel iPSC platform and support the continued pipeline growth and development.

Last year, Century Therapeutics acquired Empirica Therapeutics to leverage its iPSC-derived allogeneic cell therapies against glioblastoma, one of the most common types of primary brain tumor in adults.

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Cell Therapy Company Raises $160 Million to Advance iPSC-Derived Therapies to Clinic - BioSpace

Retracing the Lineage of Cancer Cells – Technology Networks

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There is no stronger risk factor for cancer than age. At the time of diagnosis, the median age of patients across all cancers is 66. That moment, however, is the culmination of years of clandestine tumor growth, and the answer to an important question has thus far remained elusive: When does a cancer first arise?

At least in some cases, the original cancer-causing mutation could have appeared as long as 40 years ago, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Reconstructing the lineage history of cancer cells in two individuals with a rare blood cancer, the team calculated when the genetic mutation that gave rise to the disease first appeared. In a 63-year-old patient, it occurred at around age 19; in a 34-year-old patient, at around age 9.

The findings, published in the March 4 issue ofCell Stem Cell, add to a growing body of evidence that cancers slowly develop over long periods of time before manifesting as a distinct disease. The results also present insights that could inform new approaches for early detection, prevention, or intervention.

"For both of these patients, it was almost like they had a childhood disease that just took decades and decades to manifest, which was extremely surprising," said co-corresponding study author Sahand Hormoz, HMS assistant professor of systems biology at Dana-Farber.

"I think our study compels us to ask, when does cancer begin, and when does being healthy stop?" Hormoz said. "It increasingly appears that it's a continuum with no clear boundary, which then raises another question: When should we be looking for cancer?"

In their study, Hormoz and colleagues focused on myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), a rare type of blood cancer involving the aberrant overproduction of blood cells. The majority of MPNs are linked to a specific mutation in the gene JAK2. When the mutation occurs in bone marrow stem cells, the body's blood cell production factories, it can erroneously activate JAK2 and trigger overproduction.

To pinpoint the origins of an individual's cancer, the team collected bone marrow stem cells from two patients with MPN driven by the JAK2 mutation. The researchers isolated a number of stem cells that contained the mutation, as well normal stem cells, from each patient, and then sequenced the entire genome of each individual cell.

Over time and by chance, the genomes of cells randomly acquire so-called somatic mutations--nonheritable, spontaneous changes that are largely harmless. Two cells that recently divided from the same mother cell will have very similar somatic mutation fingerprints. But two distantly related cells that shared a common ancestor many generations ago will have fewer mutations in common because they had the time to accumulate mutations separately. Cell of origin

Analyzing these fingerprints, Hormoz and colleagues created a phylogenetic tree, which maps the relationships and common ancestors between cells, for the patients' stem cells--a process similar to studies of the relationships between chimpanzees and humans, for example.

"We can reconstruct the evolutionary history of these cancer cells, going back to that cell of origin, the common ancestor in which the first mutation occurred," Hormoz said.

Combined with calculations of the rate at which mutations accumulate, the team could estimate when the JAK2 mutation first occurred. In the patient who was first diagnosed with MPN at age 63, the team found that the mutation arose around 44 years prior, at the age of 19. In the patient diagnosed at age 34, it arose at age 9.

By looking at the relationships between cells, the researchers could also estimate the number of cells that carried the mutation over time, allowing them to reconstruct the history of disease progression.

"Initially, there's one cell that has the mutation. And for the next 10 years there's only something like 100 cancer cells," Hormoz said. "But over time, the number grows exponentially and becomes thousands and thousands. We've had the notion that cancer takes a very long time to become an overt disease, but no one has shown this so explicitly until now."

The team found that the JAK2 mutation conferred a certain fitness advantage that helped cancerous cells outcompete normal bone marrow stem cells over long periods of time. The magnitude of this selective advantage is one possible explanation for some individuals' faster disease progression, such as the patient who was diagnosed with MPN at age 34.

In additional experiments, the team carried out single-cell gene expression analyses in thousands of bone marrow stem cells from seven different MPN patients. These analyses revealed that the JAK2 mutation can push stem cells to preferentially produce certain blood cell types, insights that may help scientists better understand the differences between various MPN types.

Together, the results of the study offer insights that could motivate new diagnostics, such as technologies to identify the presence of rare cancer-causing mutations currently difficult to detect, according to the authors.

"To me, the most exciting thing is thinking about at what point can we detect these cancers," Hormoz said. "If patients are walking into the clinic 40 years after their mutation first developed, could we have caught it earlier? And could we prevent the development of cancer before a patient ever knows they have it, which would be the ultimate dream?"

The researchers are now further refining their approach to studying the history of cancers, with the aim of helping clinical decision-making in the future.

While their approach is generalizable to other types of cancer, Hormoz notes that MPN is driven by a single mutation in a very slow growing type of stem cell. Other cancers may be driven by multiple mutations, or in faster-growing cell types, and further studies are needed to better understand the differences in evolutionary history between cancers.

The team's current efforts include developing early detection technologies, reconstructing the histories of greater numbers of cancer cells, and investigating why some patients' mutations never progress into full-blown cancer, but others do.

"Even if we can detect cancer-causing mutations early, the challenge is to predict which patients are at risk of developing the disease, and which are not," Hormoz said. "Looking into the past can tell us something about the future, and I think historical analyses such as the ones we conducted can give us new insights into how we could be diagnosing and intervening."

Reference:Egeren DV, Escabi J, Nguyen M, et al. Reconstructing the lineage histories and differentiation trajectories of individual cancer cells in myeloproliferative neoplasms. Cell Stem Cell. 2021;28(3):514-523.e9. doi:10.1016/j.stem.2021.02.001

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Retracing the Lineage of Cancer Cells - Technology Networks

Caribou nets $115M to boost CRISPR tech, advance off-the-shelf cell therapies – FierceBiotech

On the heels of a new partnership with AbbVie, Caribou Biosciences is reeling in $115 million to keep improving its CRISPR technology and shepherd its pipeline of allogeneic, or off-the-shelf, cell therapies into and through the clinic.

Caribous most advanced program is CB-101, an anti-CD19 CAR-T therapy that's in phase 1 in B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Its second program, CB-011, is a BCMA-targeting CAR-T in development for the treatment of multiple myeloma. A third asset targets CD371 for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia. The company is developing all three programs for patients whose cancer has come back despite undergoing other treatments or did not respond to those treatments in the first place.

RELATED: After ditching Editas, AbbVie taps Caribou for new CRISPR, CAR-T pact

Learn about the key factors that are essential to creating a collaborative and productive working relationship to advance pre-clinical drug discovery programs.

The FDA has approved four CAR-T treatments for blood cancers from Novartis, Gileads Kite unit and Bristol Myers Squibb, but all four treatments are autologous, meaning they are made with a patients own cells. Caribou and other companies taking the allogeneic tack are building their treatments with donor cells in hopes that this will clear some hurdles that come with the autologous route.

Autologous treatments can be complex and time-consuming to makecells must be taken out of the patient, modified to fight cancer and then put back into the patientand some patients simply dont have that much time. Other patients may not have enough T cells, or T cells of good enough quality, to make those treatments.

And Caribou isnt stopping at CAR-T. It is also working on an allogeneic natural killer cell therapy derived from induced pluripotent stem cells for solid tumors.

Caribou has built a remarkable and highly differentiated technology platform along with a pipeline of novel therapeutic candidates which hold breakthrough potential, said Santhosh Palani, Ph.D., partner at PFM Health Sciences, who joined Caribous board as part of the financing.

RELATED: Bristol Myers Squibb's CAR-T liso-cel wins long-delayed FDA nod

PFM led the series C round alongside Farallon Capital Management and Ridgeback Capital Investors. Caribous backers returned for the financing, including Heritage Medical Systems, Maverick Ventures, and Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, while several newcomers also joined in, including AbbVie Ventures, Janus Henderson Investors andThe Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Therapy Acceleration Program.

In addition to propelling Caribous pipeline, the capital will also bankroll the development of the CRISPR technology it uses to make its cell therapies. The funding follows the AbbVie deal, which saw Caribou snag $40 million upfront, with $300 million promised down the line.

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QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) Offers Stem Cells Therapy, An Alternative to Surgery For Pain Management in Myrtle Beach, SC – Press Release – Digital…

Myrtle Beach, SC - Often, the only solution is a surgical intervention for people who suffer from pain in their muscles, joints, and tendons. However, the professional team at QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) offers a better and non-invasive alternative by using a regenerative medicine approach to treating chronic pain and related symptoms in Myrtle Beach, SC. At QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach), the experts stay abreast of the latest advances in the stem cell and regenerative medicine world to keep delivering effective results to patients.

Rated one of the top pain clinics in the area, QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) ensures that each patient who comes into the clinic is offered a unique approach to diagnosing and treating the conditions suffered. QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) and its team employ a cutting-edge approach to handling all pain conditions to ensure effective results.

The spokesperson for QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach), while describing the regenerative medicine practice, said: Pain in your muscles, joints, and tendons can greatly affect your daily life and deter you from doing all the activities you once loved. Too often, surgery is looked at as the best solution to relieve pain. But surgery comes with long recovery times, drugs, and other less-than-desirable effects. The QC Kinetix Myrtle Beach office takes a different approach. We are a regenerative medicine clinic focusing on non-surgical methods of joint pain treatment.

The regenerative medical approach offered at the clinic focuses on whole-body healing using the blood, cells, and tissues that help repair all damaged areas, lessen inflammation and speed up the recovery process. Using stem cell therapy, the team at QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) can help patients combat all kinds of pain, especially orthopedic pain affecting the deeper areas of the muscle and tendons.

QC Kinetixs Myrtle Beach stem cells treatment is focused on different areas of the body, including the shoulder, elbow, wrists, hip, knee, ankle, feet, and low back region. Patients who suffer from chronic knee pain and instability, bone-on-bone osteoarthritis, knee arthritis, decreased range of motion, cracking, popping, or snapping sounds from the knee; torn ACL, MCL, and LCL, or torn Meniscus can take advantage of the wide range of regenerative medical treatments offered at QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach).

Patients will be exposed to class IV laser therapy, which delivers instant relief to the affected areas; Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP injections) which decreases inflammation and initiates the process of regeneration; regenerative cell therapy, which kickstarts the process of regeneration; stem cell therapy / BMAC, which aids in the tissue repair process, as well as ultrasounds which aid in proper diagnosis and procedural precision.

QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) is located at 8210 Devon Ct Suite A, Myrtle Beach, SC 29572, USA. Schedule an appointment with their providers via phone at (843) 310-2703 or visit their website.

Media Contact Company Name: QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) Contact Person: Adam Rose Email: Send Email Phone: (843) 310-2703 Address:8210 Devon Ct Suite A City: Myrtle Beach State: SC Country: United States Website: https://qckinetix.com/myrtle-beach/

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QC Kinetix (Myrtle Beach) Offers Stem Cells Therapy, An Alternative to Surgery For Pain Management in Myrtle Beach, SC - Press Release - Digital...

QC Kinetix (San Antonio) Offers Non-Surgical Regeneration Therapy To Treat Aches, Pains, and Injuries In Individuals Around San Antonio – Press…

San Antonio, CA - QC Kinetix (San Antonio) offers a range of regenerative treatments to individuals living in San Antonio and surrounding areas to treat acute and chronic pain and sports injuries. Their regenerative therapies help treat knee pain, shoulder pain, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Arthritis, Plantar Fasciitis, Tendonitis, Elbow Pain, Sciatica, Finger and Toe Pain, Foot and Hand Pain, Wrist Pain, Ankle Pain, Low Back Pain, Nerve Pain, Hip Pain, Tendon, Ligament, and Muscle Pain, and Low Levels of Testosterone in individuals.

The clinic uses stem cell therapy with BMAC and other regenerative treatments like comprehensive regenerative cell therapy injections using amniotic membrane tissue, A2M therapy, and PRP therapy. The team ensures they diagnose the patients' condition and discuss the different treatment options before proceeding with treatment. If they feel any patient is not a candidate for therapy at their clinic, they advise him/her of other options.

The patients at QC Kinetix (San Antonio) range from young athletes to active senior citizens. The doctors and treatment providers have extensive therapy in pain treatment using regenerative medicine. They speak openly with patients about their symptoms and don't try to hide anything. They aim to ensure individuals can maximize their body's ability to repair and heal itself and function efficiently. This, in turn, helps improve the individuals' overall quality of life.

The talented and well-experienced treatment providers at QC Kinetix (San Antonio) know how frustrating it can get for patients with limited mobility. They know patients can get tired of taking addictive pain medications without any positive results. They realize all of these failed attempts at treating physical ailments can have a physical and emotional toll on them.

All treatment providers at QC Kinetix (San Antonio) are board-certified and have years of regenerative medicine experience. They keep themselves updated with the latest development and technology in this field and adapt depending on their condition and requirement.

All patients that visit QC Kinetix (San Antonio) are treated equally, irrespective of age and condition. Whether individuals have mild symptoms or unbearable pain, the team at QC Kinetix (San Antonio) will ensure the patient gets full attention and is treated with care. The team knows that many people get overwhelmed at the thought of surgery and will prefer another treatment option where surgery is not required. They do their best to help individuals get treated without surgery through regenerative medicine. This place is ideal for anyone looking for San Antonio stem cell treatment.

QC Kinetix (San Antonio) has successfully treated many patients from the time they have been established. All patients who get treated at this facility go back home happier and healthier than before.

QC Kinetix (San Antonio) is located at 18707 Hardy Oak Pavilion, Suite 445, San Antonio, TX, 78258. Individuals interested in knowing more about their treatments and therapies can visit their website or contact them on (210) 571-0318 to request an appointment.

Media Contact Company Name: QC Kinetix (San Antonio) Contact Person: Casey Sietsema Email: Send Email Phone: (210) 571-0318 Address:18707 Hardy Oak Blvd Suite 445 City: San Antonio State: TX Country: United States Website: https://qckinetix.com/san-antonio/

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QC Kinetix (San Antonio) Offers Non-Surgical Regeneration Therapy To Treat Aches, Pains, and Injuries In Individuals Around San Antonio - Press...