Image credits: Anocca
T-Cells are crucial immune cells capable of recognising cancers over healthy cells. Utilising the immune system to recognise and destroy tumour cells has been the primary goal of anti-cancer immunotherapy.
Recently, there has been an increased interest in optimising this methodology to make it feasible for clinical treatment. One of the treatment modalities within cancer immunotherapy has been adoptive T cell therapy. This treatment involves infusing tumour-specific cytotoxic T cells in cancer patients to locate and destroy tumour cells.
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In the recent past, a lot of companies have emerged harnessing T-cell immunotherapy to deliver transformative therapeutics for cancer. One such is Anocca, a Swedish biotechnology company.
Secured $47M
The company has secured $47M (approx €40M) funding in a Series B round from Swedbank Robur Ny Teknik, Ramsbury Invest and family offices including those of Harald Mix and Robert Andreen and existing investors including Mellby Gård, Nidoco, and co-founder Mikael Blomqvist via Michano.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its industrialised cellular biology platform and progress its pipeline of TCR-T cellular therapies into Phase I/IIa clinical trials.
Anocca has raised over $100M (approx €84.7M) in funding to date from various investors including
Generate targeted T-cell therapies
Founded in 2014 by Reagan Jarvis, Anocca leverages a cellular biology platform that replicates human T-cell biology in the laboratory, to generate targeted T-cell therapies with broad applicability in oncology, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders.
The platform consists of numerous proprietary cell biology and molecular genetics technologies, which help develop highly targeted therapeutics that leverage T-cell immunity.
The Swedish company has established a pipeline of T-cell receptors (TCRs) against multiple antigen classes including, targets that are shared amongst tumours. At present, the company has a team of over 65 employees and operates from its site in Södertälje, Sweden.
Anocca’s CEO and co-founder Reagan Jarvis, said, “This financing round, which takes us to well over $100m raised since our founding in 2014, is a further strong endorsement of our pioneering approach to industrialised high-precision analysis of T-cell biology. The team has built and operationalised an industry-leading suite of unique technologies to generate efficient and systematic TCR-T cell therapy pipelines. We will use this substantial financing to accelerate our broad oncology pipeline into the clinic with our in-house manufacturing capabilities. We continue to methodically move towards our vision of delivering blockbuster franchises of next-generation T-cell immunotherapies for the treatment of multiple cancer types.”
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