Affini-T to close Seattle lab as it concentrates in Boston, preps two IND filings in next two months

Affini-T Therapeutics is closing its Seattle site at the end of August, CEO and co-founder Jak Knowles confirmed to Endpoints News Wednesday afternoon.

Jak Knowles

The biotech has offered its 17 Seattle-based employees the option to relocate to its Boston-area operations, where it has more than 40,000 square feet of lab space, Knowles said. Outside of Seattle, Affini-T has about 80 employees, the company said.

Some of the Seattle employees posted to LinkedIn on Wednesday, saying the site was closing and that they were open to new jobs. The CEO said Affini-T is “fully committed to supporting them.”

“The rationale here was really wanting to focus our efforts on building out our Watertown office in Boston. The company was founded out of the Fred Hutch and so a lot of our early efforts were based in the Seattle site, but as time has gone on, we’ve started to transition more towards the gene editing workflow,” Knowles said in an interview. Last year, it partnered with gene editing startup Metagenomi on ex vivo cell therapies for solid tumors.

Next month, with trial investigators at Fred Hutch, it plans to file an IND for its first KRAS G12V cell therapy. Then in September, it plans to file an IND for its second KRAS G12V cell therapy in collaboration with ElevateBio, and it expects to start dosing by year’s end, Knowles said. Affini-T is tapping into the lentiviral vector and cell therapy production chops out of ElevateBio’s BaseCamp.

The Seattle site closure comes just 16 months after the biotech emerged from stealth with $175 million from a who’s who of drug development bankrollers — Leaps by Bayer, Vida Ventures, Humboldt Fund, Catalio Capital Management, Alexandria Venture Investments and others.

Last month, the well-funded startup revealed it had hired a Sanofi oncology BD alum as its chief business officer, bringing on board the French Big Pharma’s former VP Thaminda Ramanayake as Affini-T gears up for two anticipated IND filings by year’s end. At the time, Ramanayake told Endpoints, “there is no better time to think about partnerships,” as it nears the clinic with its KRAS-targeting T cell receptor therapies.

The biotech set out to build next-gen cell therapies for solid tumors by encouraging more T cells to join in on the fight. Its scientific underpinnings come from Juno co-founder Phil Greenberg, Aude Chapuis and Tom Schmitt.

Earlier this spring, it signed a multi-year research collaboration and licensing agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

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