Investors have flocked to T-knife Therapeutics, which has been taking aim at solid tumors, an area where cell therapies have struggled to perform as well as they have in some blood cancers. Just last year, the biotech raised €66 million ($78 million) and now has reeled in a further $110 million to support a multifront push into clinical trials.
Berlin-based T-knife was founded to build on years of work to develop a transgenic mouse capable of facilitating the discovery of humanized T-cell receptors (TCRs). The work has given T-knife a platform that leverages natural selection to generate high-affinity human TCRs. An early validation test found the mice generated TCRs with higher affinity for human MAGE-1A antigen than TCRs from humans.
In a statement, Alex Mayweg, Ph.D., chairman of T-knife and managing director at Versant Ventures, called the platform “an elegant and differentiated approach to identifying potent, cancer-specific TCRs with naturally optimized affinity and specificity profiles.”
Fidelity Management led the series B with support from fellow new investors including LSP, Qatar Investment Authority and Casdin Capital. Existing backers RA Capital Management, Versant Ventures and Andera Partners also contributed.
T-knife will use the money to start enrolling patients with MAGE-A1 positive cancers in a phase 1/2 trial in the fourth quarter. Next year, T-knife plans to submit applications to run clinical trials of other candidates. Charité University Hospital, one of the groups behind T-knife, started a phase 1 trial of MAGE-A1-specific TCR-transduced T cells in multiple myeloma patients last year. The 12-subject trial is assessing the safety and tolerability of single escalating doses of the autologous T cells.
The clinical trials will start to show whether T-knife’s preclinical promise translates into efficacy in humans. Other groups have identified TCT-T cell therapies as a better way to go after solid tumors than CAR-Ts, which struggle to penetrate tumors, but T-knife and its backers see scope to improve on existing efforts by dialing up the affinity and specificity of the TCRs.