NEW YORK – A2 Biotherapeutics on Thursday closed an $80 million Series C financing round to advance its pipeline of CAR T-cell therapies.
The financing round included participation from a syndicate of investors that includes the Column Group and Samsara BioCapital.
Agoura Hills, California-based A2 plans to use the Series C funding to support ongoing clinical trials of its autologous CAR T-cell therapies, A2B530 and A2B694. The firm is currently studying A2B530 in a Phase I trial in recurrent, unresectable, locally advanced or metastatic colorectal, non-small cell lung, or pancreatic cancers that express CEA and have somatic loss of HLA-A*02. It is also studying A2B694 in a Phase I study of mesothelin-expressing solid tumors that have lost HLA-A*02 expression. The firm is further conducting a prescreening study to identify patients with HLA loss for enrollment in those two clinical studies.
The firm's CAR T-cell development platform, called Tmod, involves engineering cells with a dual-receptor design that aims to target cancer cells and avoid normal tissue through the combined action of activator and blocker elements.
In 2020, A2 raised $71.5 million in Series B financing. Since its founding in 2018, A2 has raised $216 million in funding.