PROC-001

As its AstraZeneca-partnered cardiac cell therapy moves closer to the clinic, SmartCella raised a fresh €50 million ($54.1 million) round on Monday. The UK pharma committed to about half of the total new share issue, with other investors Fjärde AP-fonden, AMF Pension, SEB-Stiftelsen, Handelsbanken Fonder and RoosGruppen AB also participating in the financing.The new funding will support commercialisation of CellThera’s FDA-cleared cell therapy delivery device, dubbed the Extroducer, which is designed to enable direct infusion to specific organs and tumours. The firm is also working on its own cell and mRNA therapies. Lead programme PROC-001, which is being developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca, is a cardiac progenitor cell therapy intended to regenerate damaged heart muscle.The experimental cell therapy is the fruit of more than six years of work. AstraZeneca first teamed up with CellThera’s ProCella unit in 2018 to develop therapies for heart failure using the biotech’s stem cell technology. The partners are currently optimising the manufacturing process and quality of PROC-001 before launching first-in-human studies.