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Orca Bio Emerges as $1 Billion-Plus Biotech With Mystery Backer

Orca Bio Emerges as $1 Billion-Plus Biotech With Mystery Backer

(Bloomberg) -- Orca Bio raised $192 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and an unnamed investor for its experimental cell therapy platform.

The investment brings total capital raised to almost $300 million, the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement Wednesday. Investors in a previous financing round valued the biotech firm at more than $1 billion, according to Chief Executive Officer Ivan Dimov.

Orca Bio Emerges as $1 Billion-Plus Biotech With Mystery Backer

Orca’s lead drug candidate, called TRGFT-201, is a blend of stem and immune cells. The off-the-shelf therapy is made from healthy donor cells and is currently being tested in blood cancer patients, where the need is great, said Dimov, one of Orca’s three co-founders. Other companies working on the next wave of cell therapies include Allogene Therapeutics Inc. and Atara Biotherapeutics Inc., some of the first to get regulatory approval were CAR-T therapies like Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Yescarta and Novartis AG’s Kymriah.

The new funding will be used to take TRGFT-201, which is still in the earliest stages of human testing, through clinical testing. Dimov says an initial readout is expected in 2022, although there’s potential to accelerate that timeline. A handful of terminal cancer patients who have undergone transplantation with Orca’s cell therapy have left the hospital much sooner than expected, and Orca plans to share peer-reviewed data sometime this year.

Orca’s cell therapy could expand the options for patients who haven’t been able to find matching bone marrow donors. It can reach patients in as few as two days, compared with the current crop of CAR-T medicines that take weeks.

“Being able to reset someone’s immune system can have a big impact on many more diseases than just cancer,” Dimov said in a phone interview. Genetic disorders and autoimmune disorders are other areas where Orca hopes to show a curative effect.

Orca Bio’s experimental medicines “have the potential to eliminate fatal side effects, such as graft versus-host disease, and infections commonly associated with bone marrow transplants, while maintaining or enhancing anti-tumor efficacy,” said advisory board member Richard Klausner, a former director of the National Cancer Institute, Juno Therapeutics and currently Grail Inc.

Other names well known to biotech investors advising Orca include Ted Love, Global Blood Therapeutics Inc.’s chief executive, and Irv Weissman, pioneering stem cell researcher and Stanford University professor who co-founded Forty Seven Inc. before it was bought by Gilead Sciences Inc. for $4.9 billion.

Other investors in this funding round included Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co., 8VC, DCVC Bio, ND Capital, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Kaiser Permanente Group Trust and IMRF.

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