Regenerative cell biotech Thymmune launches with backing from George Church, John Maraganore

01 Mar 2023
endpts.com
Cell Therapy
Thymmune Therapeutics is going after “the most important organ you’ve never heard of,” according to Pillar VC’s Thomas de Vlaam. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech has raised $7 million in seed funding to push its thymic cell therapy through preclinical studies, it announced Wednesday. Thymmune was founded in 2019 by famed Harvard geneticist George Church’s lab alumni Stan Wang, who is also the biotech’s CEO. Its seed round was led by Pillar VC, a firm that specifically invests in founder-led biotechs, followed by New York Blood Center and other biotech notables like Mark Bamforth, James Fordyce, Phil Reilly, July Pagliuca, John Maraganore and Church. Reilly, who was the first CMO at bluebird bio and co-founded Voyager Therapeutics, is also on the company’s board while Church serves as its scientific advisor. Thymmune spent its first few years translating Wang’s postdoc work into a platform. The biotech is combining machine learning with induced stem cell engineering. With the platform, the company wants to develop an off-the-shelf thymic cell therapy. It first hopes to tackle congenital athymia, in which babies are born without a thymus. Wang said Thymmune is aiming for an IND by 2025. The thymus is a tiny organ in the center of the chest that helps train T cells to fight foreign antigens. Currently, babies with athymia get a thymus implant from another child, where their thymic tissue is harvested during their open heart surgery, cultured, and then grafted into the baby with athymia. “It’s not a scalable approach,” Wang noted. “That’s where we come in with this platform to not only mass produce these cells for those initial immune deficiencies, but also all the other applications we can have over time for the technology across the spectrum of immunology.” Wang envisions the therapy can be used for patients who get radiation, chemo or a thymectomy who might not have functioning thymuses. Even further down the road, he hopes Thymmune can tackle aging, since people naturally lose their thymic function over time, making them more susceptible to infections. “We’re imagining a future where once we all turn say 50, 60, 70, we can get a dose of these thymic cells in in our muscles — say in our thigh — and it gives us pretty much a new functioning thymus, and we’re able to rejuvenate our immune function to give better responses against cancer, vaccines, pathogens, etc,” Wang said. “So that’s a fascinating long term vision we’re building towards, but it’s going to take time and even more capital towards that end.”
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