Acepodia’s off-the-shelf cell therapies get another $100M for oncology trials

California and Taipei biotech Acepodia has lined up another six-figure funding round to take its off-the-shelf cell therapies forward.

Spun out of Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab and founded in 2017 by ex-Juno EVP Patrick Yang and UC Berkeley cell biologist Sonny Hsiao, the biotech has now raised a total of $259 million thanks to a $100 million Series D disclosed Tuesday morning.

The round follows a $109 million Series C in December 2021, at which point Yang told Endpoints News the startup would monitor the public markets and consider whether to go public in 2022. But as the markets cooled following a pandemic high, the biotech chose to go with another private round, led by Digital Mobile Venture, to bankroll clinical trials of allogeneic cell therapies in non-Hodgkin lymphoma and EGFR-expressing solid tumors.

As the industry grapples with access issues for approved autologous cell therapies, which require complex manufacturing of cells taken directly from the patient, Acepodia is working to make cell therapies that it says could be more “broadly accessible for cancer patients.”

Instead of antibody-drug conjugates, which have consumed headlines as of late with Pfizer’s Seagen deal and other pacts, Acepodia is developing what it calls antibody-cell conjugates. The approach, born out of Hsiao’s research, pairs targeted monoclonal antibodies with immune cells that destroy cancer. Instead of delivering them separately, Acepodia hopes the conjugation effort will lead to less diffusion throughout the body, Hsiao previously told Endpoints.

Patrick Yang

“It’s totally different from the CAR-T scientific community,” Yang told Endpoints at the time of the Series C. “Some of the immune cells like NK cells, they’re just patrolling in the body with no specific objective, no targets. If we arm it with a GPS guided to the destination, we could radically improve the treatment outcome.”

The Alameda, CA-based biotech lists six cell therapies on its pipeline, with the current round focused on gamma delta 2 T cell therapies ACE1831 and ACE2016. The first is an anti-CD20 asset that recently entered Phase I for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and the latter goes after EGFR-expressing solid tumors, with preclinical data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research two months ago.

In its funding announcement, Acepodia did not mention its once-lead candidate, ACE1702, for which it presented clinical data in patients with HER2 solid tumors in 2021.

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