Mission Bio raises $70m to help develop cancer therapies
With this round of funding, the total Mission Bio has raised comes to more than $110m. The companies contributing to this most recent round include pharma investor Nova Growth and Soleus Capital; returning investors include Mayfield, Cota and Agilent.
According to Mission Bio CEO and founder Charlie Silver, the money will be used for a number of purposes, including stepped-up up efforts to support development of precision cancer treatments.
“We’ll be using the funds to meet the current demand for our Tapestri Platform and to scale the company,” he said. “We’re going to continue hiring and growing our manufacturing, R&D, and commercial teams to support the company’s reach in NCI Cancer centers and enabling key biopharma customers for improved clinical trials, as well as characterization for cell and gene therapy.”
Mission bio’s single-sell Tapestri Platform technology examines both DNA and protein at the single-cell level to lead to robust, high-fidelity data to inform clinical decisions, advance precision oncology treatments and save lives.
“Tapestri is the industry’s first and only platform that targets both DNA and protein at the single-cell level, giving researchers and clinicians the full picture of how cancer evolves and responds to treatment,” Silver explained. “These then can be used to select the right patients and therapies to maximize the best outcomes in clinical trials.”
Over the course of the past year, Mission Bio reportedly has made progress in its efforts to support drug development via clinical trials and the translation of research into novel biomarkers with its growing install base in NCI cancer centers and key biopharma companies. Novo Growth reportedly was tapped as an investor to aid Mission Bio in scaling Tapestri, with the goal of creating a more significant effect on drug development and cell and gene therapy.
Silver said Mission Bio wants to have “the biggest impact on oncology.”
“We are starting to see how combination and dynamic therapies could be successful -- determining the right combination of drugs for the right patient at the right stage of disease -- so we’re going to continue investing and enabling researchers and clinicians in this area,” he said. “We also see the cell and gene therapy space is important because current methodologies lack the sensitivity to show the heterogeneity of transduction and editing efficiency, along with therapy response."
"These drugs are really at the frontier for some of the most exciting areas of precision medicine, so we want to support that effort by helping to bring more effective therapies to the market, faster,” he added.
