Months af­ter achiev­ing uni­corn sta­tus, Or­ca steers in­to the fast lane with an RMAT des­ig­na­tion for cell ther­a­py can­di­date

A few months af­ter its last big catch — a $192 mil­lion Se­ries D and rare uni­corn sta­tus — Or­ca Bio has reeled in the FDA’s re­gen­er­a­tive med­i­cine ad­vanced ther­a­py (RMAT) des­ig­na­tion for its ex­per­i­men­tal cell ther­a­py to treat blood stem cell trans­plant pa­tients.

Or­ca, one of this year’s End­points 11 star­tups, was found­ed by three en­tre­pre­neurs who were in­trigued by Irv Weiss­man’s cell pu­rifi­ca­tion work while study­ing at Stan­ford. No­var­tis — then San­doz — had pur­chased Weiss­man’s spin­out SyS­temix in the ’90s, then scrapped it due to prac­ti­cal chal­lenges. But Jeroen Bekaert, Ivan Di­mov and Nate Fern­hoff saw po­ten­tial there.

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