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Funding this week went mostly to companies with sophisticated tech platforms. Financing rounds will support platforms for tumor-targeting antibodies, genome-scale nucleic acid imaging and no-code bioinformatics for scientists to store and visualize data. Coya Therapeutics Coya Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company utilizing cell-based therapy for neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases, just announced it has raised approximately $10.3 million from institutional and accredited investors. This brings the company's total funding to date to over $20 million. This financing paves the way for clinical development across several of Coya’s therapeutic programs, including COYA 101, an autologous Treg cell therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); COYA 201, an autologous Treg-derived exosome therapeutic for ALS; COYA 202, an allogenic Treg-derived exosome therapy for frontal temporal dementia; and a novel biologic program for investigational new drug (IND) submissions for ALS, frontal temporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. ImmunOs Therapeutics Switzerland-based ImmunOs Therapeutics closed an oversubscribed Series B financing round with $74 million. The round was led by new investors Samsara BioCapital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gimv, joined by new investors Mission BioCapital, GL Capital, PEAK6 Strategic Capital and Fiscus Financial, as well as existing investors Pfizer Ventures, BioMed Partners, and Schroder Adveq. The funding will propel ImmunOs’ clinical development of its lead program, IOS-1002, a first-in-class, multi-functional agent that targets components of the immune system, as well as several other immunotherapy treatments for solid and liquid tumors. The funding will also support ImmunOs’ new U.S. subsidiary to expand its international reach and execute U.S. clinical trials. PineTree Therapeutics PineTree Therapeutics, a pre-clinical stage biotech company that pioneers disruptive therapies in oncology and immuno-oncology, closed a Series A1 round of funding worth $23.5 million. Investors included InterVest, SK Securities, DSC Investment, J Curve Investment, Samho Green Investment and SJ Investment Partners. With the money, PineTree will advance its oncology and viral disease platforms, including its Tumor Associated Essential Receptor Targeting AntiBody (TAER-TAB) platform, which targets and degrades drug-resistant and difficult-to-treat receptors on types of tumors and types of immune and disease cells. National Resilience Complex medicine biomanufacturing company National Resilience raised $625 million in a Series D financing. That amount is on top of a previously unannounced $600 million Series C financing the company completed in August 2021. “These new funds will help support our next phase of growth, as we continue to innovate biomanufacturing across all our modalities, expand our footprint to serve customers, sign strategic collaborations and support the developers of a new generation of complex medicines,” Rahul Singhvi, Sc.D., CEO of Resilience, said. The funding will also help Resilience advance its R&D efforts, including stable cell lines for viral vector production and continuous manufacturing for biologics. Vizgen Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vizgen closed a Series C financing, bringing in $85.2 million. The financing was led by Blue Water Life Science Advisors and ARCH Venture Partners and included support from Sofina, Northpond Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, Novalis LifeSciences, David Walt and others. Vizgen, which visualizes single-cell spatial genomics information, will use the funds to advance drug discovery and improve insight into tissue-scale basic research and translational medicine. The funding will also hone the company’s Merscope platform, which enables massively multiplexed, genome-scale nucleic acid imaging with high accuracy and detection efficiency at subcellular resolution. LatchBio In a Series A round of financing, San Francisco-based LatchBio raised $28 million for its modern data analysis stack. The funding was co-led by Coatue and Lux Capital with participation from Hummingbird Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, and existing investors Haystack and Fifty Years. With the money, LatchBio will continue its work on its cloud-based platform, which offers no-code bioinformatics for scientists to store and visualize data. The platform helps solve computational and logistical challenges for researchers with its biocomputing workflows, which can speed up discovery and translational research. Vernal Biosciences Vernal Biosciences completed a $21 million financing with the goal of fully integrating its mRNA manufacturing solutions. The financing, led by Ampersand Capital Partners and Dynamk Capital with participation from Alloy Therapeutics, ATUM and Charles River Laboratories, Inc., will support Vernal’s goal of bringing design sequences, plasmid template and RNA manufacturing, release testing of drug products and other mRNA and LNP-mRNA manufacturing services all under a single contract.

Only a handful of biotechs are going after LILRBs, components of the innate immune system. But after an initial crop of data out of Merck in autumn 2020, more interest sprung up in the area, and a former Merck franchise director has secured investor backing to try to catch up to his former employer. Zurich-area biotech ImmunOs Therapeutics reeled in a $74 million Series B to take that lead program into a Phase Ia study in Australia toward the end of this year, executives told Endpoints News . The drug, dubbed IOS-1002, is a multi-agent based on human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) that go after two versions of LILRB (1 and 2) and KIR3DL1. Merck’s antibody targets LILRB2, meanwhile, and in a Phase I solid tumor study in 2020, the Big Pharma’s drug — when combined with Keytruda — led to responses in eight out of 34 patients. Known as MK-4830, the drug is now in Phase II for non-small cell lung, colorectal, renal cell and small cell lung cancer. Charlene Liao, CEO of LILRB competitor Immune-Onc, previously described LILRBs as the PD-1 of T cells when her startup raised nearly the same amount last March. While ImmunOs is well behind in clinical development, the 20-employee biotech thinks the transatlantic financing round and its academic-founded science can beat out competitors. “We expect to be able to demonstrate superior monotherapy efficacy relative to what others are doing. We expect to go into a broader indication set because we’re multitasking against multiple immune checkpoints. And we also expect to see a more durable response,” CEO Sean Smith, a former franchise director for Merck’s Europe and Canada hospital portfolio, told Endpoints. ImmunOs will begin the Phase Ia trial in Australia and then expand into other regions, CBO and COO Jeff Abbey, the former Argos Therapeutics CEO, said in the joint interview. “We really had our pick of investors and, as Sean said, we wanted an international syndicate to really preserve our optionality going forward so that we’re well-funded and can continue to build out the company the way we want to build it out,” Abbey said. The fresh funds will bankroll the Phase I study and get the drug into a Phase II trial as well, the executives noted. The financing will also support another clinical entry in oncology and the biotech’s first human study foray in the autoimmune field. ImmunOs is “reverse-engineering” its immuno-oncology program to get into the autoimmune space, explained chief development officer Steve Coats. The former AstraZeneca R&D VP is building out ImmunOs’ US operations in Gaithersburg, MD, a Mid-Atlantic city he described as an “underappreciated technology center” that is close to universities, AstraZeneca acquisition MedImmune, FDA and the NIH. The Swiss biotech was spun out of the University of Basel and University of Zurich in 2017 and is based off the work of CMO Christoph Renner and CSO Osiris Marroquin Belaunzaran. Tuesday’s Series B was led by new investors Samsara BioCapital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Gimv. Mission BioCapital, GL Capital, PEAK6 Strategic Capital and Fiscus Financial also joined for the first time, adding to the original 2019 backing from Pfizer Ventures, BioMed Partners and Schroder Adveq.