June 19, 2017
John George, Senior Reporter
The University of Pennsylvania has spun out another biotechnology company focused on developing immunotherapies to battle cancer.
CARMA Therapeutics Inc., co-founded by Penn with Dr. Saar Gill and Penn doctorate candidate Michael Klichinsky, said this week it closed an initial financing round. The venture capital financing, the amount of which is being kept private, was co-led by AbbVie Ventures and HealthCap. Also participating were Grazia Equity and IP Group Inc.
CARMA was founded to commercialize technology from the Penn’s Center for Cellular Immunotherapies. The company name is an acronym derived from its intent to build a pipeline of cancer programs using a proprietary platform combining chimeric antigen receptor targeting with macrophages to treat solid tumors.
Chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, are used to graft an arbitrary specificity onto an immune effector cell, also known as a T cell, to improve the ability of a patient’s immune system to identify and attack tumor cells. Macrophages are a type of cell found in stationary form in the tissues, or as a mobile white blood cell — especially at sites of infection.
“Macrophages can engulf and kill cells through the process of phagocytosis,” said Klichinsky, who is a doctorate candidate in Penn’s Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. “By genetically engineering these cells with CARs, we can specifically direct them to tumor cells, such as ovarian cancer cells.… We expect that CAR macrophages will prime a T cell immune response against the tumor.”
CARMA was spun out from the laboratory run by Gill, an assistant professor of hematology oncology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “We hypothesized early on that focusing on different effector cells, other than T cells, might be more effective in trying to tackle solid tumors, which has been a challenge for T cell therapies,” Gill said. “The innate biology drove us to try macrophages.”
Another Penn spinout, Tmunity Therapeutics, is attempting to commercialize discoveries of Penn Medicine’s T cell therapy pioneer Dr. Carl June. Dr. Usman “Oz” Azam, previously global head of the cell and gene therapies unit at Novartis, was hired by Tmunity as its first president and CEO late last year.
Bruce Peacock, a veteran of the region’s biotech industry who held administrative posts at companies including Centocor and Cephalon, is serving at CARMA’s executive chairman. The company is actively recruiting candidates to serve as its first CEO.
Peacock, who is retired and sits on the board of about a half-dozen life sciences companies, was recruited to Carma by Dora Mitchell, director of the UPstart program at PCI Ventures, a division of the Penn Center for Innovation. He said he was impressed by Gill and Klichinsky, and welcomed the opportunity to help add another life sciences company to the region’s landscape.
“I’ve watched the erosion of the biopharmaceutical sector here,” Peacock said, noting the sale or relocation of many of the region’s larger biopharmaceutical companies in recent years. “Boston is thriving, and the big guys are setting up R&D shops there. For a veteran of the biopharma industry here, that’s been kind of frustrating.”
Peacock said the proceeds from the initial financing will be used primarily to advance the development of its company’s first product candidate, CARMA-0508, an adoptive cellular immunotherapy for the treatment of metastatic solid tumors.
He said the funds will also help the company — based in the Pennovation Center in West Philadelphia — further develop its business plan and get contracts in place for manufacturing and clinical development, which will better position it to purse a larger, series-A financing round.
“CARMA is an early-stage company,” Peacock said, “but we could be [testing the company’s lead drug candidate in patients] in 2018.”
John George covers health care, biotech/pharmaceuticals and sports business.