NEW YORK – Arsenal Biosciences on Thursday said it has raised $325 million in an oversubscribed Series C financing round to advance its pipeline of CAR T-cell therapies for solid tumors.
New investors ARCH Venture Partners, Milky Way Investments Group, Regeneron Ventures, NVentures, Luma Group, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Rock Springs Capital, and others joined existing investors Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bristol Myers Squibb, Westlake Village BioPartners, Kleiner Perkins, Byers Capital, and Hitachi Ventures in the financing round.
ArsenalBio has built a pipeline of cell therapy products on its T-cell engineering platform, which uses synthetic biology to genetically program a patient's T cells to attack solid tumors. It has two programs in early clinical development, AB-1015 for ovarian cancer and AB-2100 for kidney cancer. The South San Francisco, California-based company began a Phase I trial of AB-1015 in patients with ovarian cancer that is resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy in January 2023. And in April, the company dosed the first patient in a Phase I/II trial of AB-2100 in patients with clear-cell renal carcinoma that is recurrent or did not improve after treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor and a VEGF inhibitor.
"Our initial clinical trials and preclinical studies have shown the promise of our T-cell engineering approach and have given us the confidence to broaden the application of our technology to address additional cancer types," ArsenalBio CEO Ken Drazan said in a statement. "This new investment enables us to continue our development roadmap, scale up our manufacturing capabilities, and invest in new avenues for innovation in T-cell medicine."
ArsenalBio previously raised $220 million in a Series B financing round in September 2022 and $85 million in a Series A in October 2019.