David Southwell. TScan

No­var­tis backs Har­vard spin­out's quest to build TCR repos­i­to­ry in $48M round

As T cell re­cep­tors emerged as a po­tent tool for the im­mune sys­tem to latch on­to tu­mor anti­gens, Stephen Elledge want­ed to screen anti­gen-TCR match­es in a faster, more sys­tem­at­ic way — one that would go be­yond cur­rent­ly known tar­gets but stop short of the new realms of neoanti­gens bioin­for­mat­ic pre­dic­tions.

So the Har­vard pro­fes­sor spent the last 7 years con­sol­i­dat­ing new tech to come up with a plat­form that can run mul­ti­ple TCRs against anti­gen epi­topes and pin­point the ex­act pairs that ap­pear to in­ter­act. There’s al­so a built-in li­brary of the hu­man pep­tidome to flag any off-tar­get ef­fects and pre­vent safe­ty scares down the road.

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.