NEW YORK – OriCell Therapeutics on Monday announced it has raised more than $120 million in a Series B financing round, which it will put toward advancing its cell therapy pipeline and drug discovery platform as well as constructing a manufacturing facility for clinical and commercial use.
Qiming Venture Partners and Quan Capital led the financing round, and existing shareholder C&D Emerging Capital participated, as did several unnamed international and Chinese investment funds.
Shanghai-based OriCell has cell therapies in various stages of development for both solid tumors and blood cancers. In June, China's National Medical Products Administration accepted an investigational new drug application for Ori-C101, OriCell's autologous CAR T-cell therapy directed against GPC3 on the surface of advanced liver cancer. The trial is ongoing, and so far, the treatment has led to a 44 percent objective response rate and 78 percent disease control rate for patients with GPC3-positive advanced liver cancer, according to data presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting.
Separately, OriCell is developing OriCAR-017, a GPRC5D-directed CAR T-cell therapy for patients with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma. In the Phase I POLARIS clinical trial, the safety and tolerability profile were manageable, and according to data presented during ASCO and the European Hematology Association annual meeting, the objective response rates and minimal residual disease-negative rates were both 100 percent. Five patients who had received prior BCMA CAR T-cell therapy were among the responders. The firm is ramping up its plans for registration and clinical development in China and the US.
Finally, OriCell is codeveloping its PD-L/4-1BB bispecific antibody, OriBs-001, with Antengene following an exclusive global license agreement in 2019. Both the US Food and Drug Administration and the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration have given OriCell the go-ahead to evaluate the therapy for solid tumors in clinical trials, and China's Center for Drug Evaluation has granted what OriCell is calling an implied approval.