Just a day af­ter an­nounc­ing the for­ma­tion of a start­up in Switzer­land that will de­vel­op al­ter­na­tive TCR cell ther­a­pies, Ver­sant is keep­ing its foot on the gas.

The multi­bil­lion dol­lar life sci­ences VC an­nounced Thurs­day morn­ing it is lead­ing the Se­ries A fund­ing of T-knife, a Ger­man biotech that plans to use its pro­pri­etary hu­man­ized T cell re­cep­tor (HuT­CR) mouse plat­form to treat sol­id tu­mors. T-knife raised about $78.4 mil­lion in the round and hopes to not on­ly de­vel­op its own pipeline but al­so li­cense out its mice for use by oth­er com­pa­nies.

“This plat­form that we have, I would say, is so broad­ly ap­plic­a­ble that we know it has val­ue not on­ly to us but very well give val­ue to oth­er com­pa­nies as well,” CEO Elisa Kieback told End­points News. “So our busi­ness strat­e­gy is, of course, pri­mar­i­ly to de­vel­op our own pipeline of prod­ucts, but at the same time [ap­ply] this plat­form with phar­mas and biotechs to gen­er­ate re­cep­tors for their plat­forms.”

RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment co-led the round, and ex­ist­ing in­vestors An­dera Part­ners and Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed.

Thomas Blanken­stein

Pri­va­tized re­search is a bit of a new area for Kieback, as T-knife’s plat­form was spun out of an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting at the Max-Del­bruck Cen­ter with the sup­port of Char­ité Uni­ver­si­ty Hos­pi­tal in Berlin where Kieback worked with pro­fes­sor Thomas Blanken­stein. Blanken­stein, who is al­so a sci­en­tif­ic co-founder of T-knife, pi­o­neered the foun­da­tion for T-knife’s mice be­gin­ning in the ear­ly 2000s, and he and Kieback have since con­duct­ed aca­d­e­m­ic tri­als pri­or to found­ing the com­pa­ny.

As the costs to run those ex­per­i­ments grew, the duo rec­og­nized the need to take the re­search pri­vate. One of the perks of be­ing pri­vate, Kieback said, is that un­der­tak­ing the nec­es­sary tri­als pro­ceeds at a much faster pace than in acad­e­mia.

“We ba­si­cal­ly re­al­ized what the plat­form could do, but we al­so saw how ex­pen­sive cell ther­a­py is to man­u­fac­ture these prod­ucts and bring them to the clin­ic,” Kieback said. “That was around the time we de­cid­ed we need­ed to take this pri­vate, it couldn’t be lim­it­ed as an aca­d­e­m­ic re­search tool be­cause it re­al­ly had po­ten­tial to bring these re­cep­tors and ther­a­pies to pa­tients, and for that we need­ed pri­vate mon­ey.”

While Mat­ter­horn, which Ver­sant un­veiled Wednes­day, deals al­so with TCR ther­a­pies, it does so in a dif­fer­ent man­ner than T-knife in that the for­mer at­tempts to un­der­stand a class of T cells that could specif­i­cal­ly tar­get MR1. T-knife’s mice, mean­while, ex­press on­ly hu­man TCRs that are re­strict­ed to hu­man leuko­cyte anti­gen, or HLA.

T-knife’s lead prod­uct tar­gets MAGE-A1, which be­longs to the group of can­cer/testis anti­gens, in pa­tients with mul­ti­ple myelo­ma. Nor­mal­ly ex­pressed as testis in healthy tis­sue, this pro­tein can some­times be er­ro­neous­ly ac­ti­vat­ed in tu­mor cells.

“It’s an ide­al tar­get be­cause it’s not present in healthy tis­sue apart from testis, and testis can­not be at­tacked by T cells,” Kieback said. “And the oth­er re­al­ly great thing about it is there are many oth­er tu­mor in­di­ca­tions which are hav­ing MAGE-A1 ex­pres­sion, so we can ap­ply this ther­a­py in so many dif­fer­ent ways.”

The fund­ing will give T-knife three years of run­way, Kieback said, and al­low the biotech to fin­ish Phase I tri­als for that lead can­di­date. In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny can al­so bring up to three fur­ther pipeline pro­grams in­to Phase I with the cash.

Long-term, the goal is an IPO, but Kieback isn’t think­ing that far ahead just yet.

“The cur­rent plan is of course to set up as a trans-At­lantic com­pa­ny, so maybe that’s how we’ll be in the be­gin­ning,” Kieback said. “That’s al­so one of the rea­sons why we re­al­ly be­lieve we need US in­vest­ments at this stage be­cause we need to set up of­fices in the US and re­cruit man­age­ment, so this is our next step.”

Six years ago, a band of neuroscientists from the University of California, San Francisco combined decades of research and jumped into the hunt for an off-the-shelf cell therapy. Now, that team is sprinting toward the clinic with a treatment for epilepsy — but first, it’s making a pit stop at the venture well.

Neurona Therapeutics unveiled a $41.5 million round on Tuesday morning, bringing the San Francisco-based biotech’s total raise to $135 million. The cash will be used to advance the company’s pipeline, including an upcoming Phase I/IIa for its lead candidate, NRTX-1001, in chronic focal epilepsy.

One of the earliest employees at AI biotech Recursion Pharmaceuticals is leading a new company, and he’s just closed a hefty Series A to get things moving.

Enveda Biosciences pulled in $51 million in the raise, the company announced Tuesday morning, with the goal of pushing some of its preclinical programs further along. Led by CEO Viswa Colluru, Enveda aims to research how machine learning can utilize natural biology to create new therapies for Wilson’s Disease, NASH and Parkinson’s disease, among others.

As the Biden administration tries to wrangle the details of its infrastructure bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) took a concrete step forward on drug pricing reforms on Tuesday and unveiled five principles for such reforms, including providing Medicare with the ability to negotiate prices.

“Allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate the price Medicare will pay creates a much needed mechanism to achieve fairer prices when the market has failed to do so,” Wyden wrote.

Endpoints News turned five years old over the weekend. I wanted to mark the happy occasion by extending our deepest gratitude to Endpoints’ premium subscribers while outlining several other ways to support us as we go broader and get bigger this year and beyond.

Same as any business, we’ve got to create value and get paid for delivering it. So if you depend on Endpoints to stay abreast on biopharma developments, we depend on you too.

More than a year ago, Roche and Eli Lilly were forced to contend with a Phase II/III failure of their respective Alzheimer’s drugs. But while Eli Lilly essentially threw in the towels, Roche wasn’t ready to give up yet.

The Swiss drugmaker now has some biomarker data to spotlight as investigators continue monitoring patients in an open-label extension study.

Dubbed DIAN-TU, the study had been designed to see whether Roche’s gantenerumab and Lilly’s solanezumab could spur a cognitive benefit for a group of patients who had a rare, inherited form of Alzheimer’s that’d tied to early-onset. In short, they didn’t: Both failed the primary endpoint.