China biotech player Gracell raises $100m Series C
Wellington Management, OrbiMed and Morningside Ventures have led a $100 million Series C round for Gracell Biotechnologies, a China-based developer of cancer treatments.
Vivo Capital came in as a new investor, while existing backers Temasek Holdings, Lilly Asia Ventures (LAV), and King Star Capital re-upped. The company received $85 million in Series B funding in early 2019 led by Temasek and featuring LAV, Kington Capital, King Star, and Chengdu Miaoji. 6 Dimensions Capital provided a Series A round of undisclosed size in 2017, shortly after the company’s founding.
Gracell was established by William Cao – previously co-founder and CEO of US-listed Cellular Biomedicine Group – to address several challenges facing CAR-T cell therapies. Specifically, the manufacturing process is expensive, lengthy and inefficient and the drugs produced aren’t effective against solid tumors. Gracell wanted to create an affordable yet effective off-the-shelf product.
It has developed two main development platforms: FasTCAR, where cell culturing takes place within 24 hours rather than the standard 2-3 weeks, resulting in younger, more potent T-cells; and TruUCAR, which involves taking cells from healthy donors and modifying them with gene editing to reduce the chances of rejection by the host. TruUCAR therapies are available off-the-shelf at a fraction of the typical cost for CAR-T therapies, but the product is not tailored to individual patients.
Gracell is now developing a pipeline of drug candidates that have come through the FasTCAR and TruUCAR systems, targeting solid tumors as well as blood, bone marrow and lymph node cancers. One product – which addresses cancers that have returned after remission or are not responding to standard therapies – is undergoing phase-one clinical trials in China.
“We are very pleased to expand our investor base with support from a high caliber consortium,” said Cao, in a statement. “Our passion is to bring transformative CAR-T cell therapies to a broader group of patients by developing products that are efficacious and can be made widely available.”
The new funding will go towards R&D and the advancement of clinical programs.
Other recent funding rounds for Chinese start-ups focusing on CAR-T cell therapies include a $100 million Series B – led by CPE – for JW Therapeutics. The company, which is also backed by Temasek, is an immunotherapy specialist developing CAR-T treatments for blood cancers. It has one drug in stage-two trials in China that targets the CD19 antigen, one of the most common proteins in white blood cells.
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