Singapore’s Tessa Therapeutics raises US$126m led by Polaris Partners
The company hopes to advance 2 key programmes targeted at cancer treatment.
Sharanya Pillai
SINGAPORE-BASED Tessa Therapeutics has raised US$126 million in a Series A funding round led by US healthcare investor Polaris Partners, to advance clinical development of immune cell therapies for cancer.
The biotech’s existing investors, which include Temasek, EDBI, Heliconia Capital and Heritas Capital, also participated in the round. Polaris’ managing partners Amy Schulman and Darren Carroll have joined Tessa’s board of directors.
Founded in 2012, Tessa is a player in the niche field of CAR-T therapy, where a patient’s immune cells are harvested, engineered to target cancer cells and infused back in the patient – in what is known as the “autologous” method. The company’s lead asset, dubbed TT11, targets relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma.
Clinical data from the pilot stage of TT11’s ongoing Phase 2 trial showed promising efficacy in patients, with 57.1 per cent of the participants showing a “complete response”, or disappearance of all signs of cancer. Overall, 71.4 per cent of participants had a complete or partial response to TT11.
Tessa expects to advance to the pivotal Phase 2 trial later this year. The clinical trial supplies will be manufactured in its recently-built commercial cell therapy manufacturing facility in Singapore.
Another key Tessa programme is TT11X, based on its proprietary platform that can produce allogenic – or “off-the-shelf” cell therapies. This could make CAR-T therapy more scalable and accessible, as opposed to the highly-personalised autologous method. Tessa also said that its platform overcomes toxicity challenges common to off-the-shelf cell therapies, such as host rejection of the graft cells.
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Clinical data from an ongoing Phase 1 study of TT11X showed encouraging signs of efficacy, with clinical responses in 7 out of 9 patients, Tessa said. This included a complete disappearance of tumour in 4 patients.
Tessa recently presented clinical data from the TT11 and TT11X programmes at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology, which demonstrates the potential of its therapies, said John Ng, chief technology officer and acting chief executive of Tessa.
“This financing will be instrumental to helping us achieve several key near-term milestones, including the initiation of a pivotal clinical trial of our TT11 programme and advancement of our TT11X programme,” he said.
Schulman of Polaris Partners added that the company is at an “exciting point with 2 differentiated clinical-stage programmes pursuing novel approaches”.
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