Cambridge startup Thymmune lands $37M from Biden’s ARPA-H for thymus-rejuvenating therapies

The Biden administration is awarding up to $37 million to Thymmune Therapeutics, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced Thursday. The biotech startup uses stem cells to develop thymus-rejuvenating therapies.

Thymmune’s new funding comes amidst a busy week for ARPA-H, a new research agency that the Biden administration established last year to fund big swings at biomedicine’s toughest problems.

Over the past week, ARPA-H has doled out more than $300 million in awards for “unconventional approaches” that include 3D-printed human hearts, microbes programmed to kill cancer, mRNA vaccines and new diagnostics for drug-resistant bacteria. So far, Thymmune is the only biotech company on the list.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup is in the early stages of developing thymus stem cell therapies. The thymus is a small gland that sits behind the breastbone and shrinks with age, but is vital for making and training T cells, which fight infections and cancer.

Thymmune’s initial focus is to develop replacements for children born without a thymus, or people who lose it due to cancer treatments or autoimmune disease — conditions that collectively affect about 10,000 people each year. But the company also wants to use the cell therapy to combat waning immunity in old age.

“When we presented that vision to ARPA-H, it very much resonated with their mission statement as well,” Thymmune founder and CEO Stan Wang told Endpoints News in an interview. “We all have immune decline and our approach is potentially a way to address that for a very large number of people.”

The $37 million will be split into two phases over a few years, Wang said, initially focused on designing and manufacturing the cells — induced pluripotent stem thymic epithelial cells — that will be used in the treatments. The second part will work towards testing the safety and efficacy of those cell transplants in animal models, with an eye towards those “larger application, like the immune decline of aging that affects us all,” Wang added.

In March, the ten-person startup announced $7 million in seed financing from Pillar VC, NYBC Ventures and a roster of biotech luminaries including former Alnylam Pharmaceuticals CEO John Maraganore and Harvard University geneticist George Church.

ARPA-H began seeking research proposals in the spring. The agency will continue to fund new projects on a rolling basis through March 2024.

Thomas de Vlaam

“They moved incredibly swiftly,” Thomas de Vlaam, a principal at Pillar VC, one of Thymmune’s investors, told Endpoints. “It was really a collaborative effort to maximize the impact of this funding.”

Both de Vlaam and Wang said that the ARPA-H award announcement came so suddenly — days before a possible government shutdown — that they haven’t had time decide how it will affect the startup’s efforts to raise a series A round.

“We’re in the process of working through that,” Wang said. “What this means is, in the current market, we can be more selective about the partners that we want to work with.”

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