Clinical-stage Houston cell therapy company closes $28.4M oversubscribed series A

cha-ching

March Biosciences' oversubscribed raise brought in $28.4 million of financing with Mission BioCapital and 4BIO Capital leading the pack of investors. Photo via Getty Images

An emerging biotech company in Houston has closed its series A with outsized success.

March Biosciences' oversubscribed raise brought in $28.4 million of financing with Mission BioCapital and 4BIO Capital leading the pack of investors. The company has now raised more than $51 million in total.

Last year, March Biosciences announced its strategic alliance with CTMC (Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center), a joint venture between MD Anderson Cancer Center and National Resilience. CEO Sarah Hein met her co-founder, Max Mamonkin, at the TMC Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics. Along with fellow co-founder Malcolm Brenner, March Biosciences launched from the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital). Its goal is to fight cancers that have been unresponsive to existing immunotherapies using its lead asset, MB-105.

An autologous CD5-targeted CAR-T cell therapy, MB-105 is currently in phase-1 trials in patients with refractory T-cell lymphoma and leukemia. The treatment is showing signs of being both safe and effective, meriting a phase-2 trial that will begin early next year. The funds raised from the series A will help to finance the Phase 2 clinical development of MB-105 to expand on the existing data with optimized manufacturing processes.

“This oversubscribed financing enables us to advance our first-in-class CAR-T therapy, MB-105, into a Phase 2 trial for T-cell lymphoma – an indication with an exceptionally poor prognosis and few treatment options,” says Hein. “With the support and confidence of our investors, we are not only advancing our lead program but also expanding our pipeline, underscoring our commitment to delivering best-in-class therapies to patients that can change the treatment paradigm for these challenging cancers.”

But that’s not the only exciting news that Hein and her associates have to report. March Biosciences has recently partnered with cell therapy venture studio, Volnay Therapeutics. Led by highly experienced cell therapy development veterans, the March Biosciences team will work to develop a scalable manufacturing process for MB-105 that will lead to commercialization. Volnay co-founder and CEO Stefan Wildt, who held key R&D leadership positions in cell and gene therapy units at Novartis and Takeda, has also joined the board of March Biosciences. The board of directors is also welcoming Cassidy Blundell of Mission BioCapital and Owen Smith of 4BIO Capital.

“The team at March Biosciences is leveraging powerful science and promising clinical data to tackle cancers with significant unmet need,” says Blundell, a partner at Mission BioCapital. “We're excited to support their journey and believe their focused approach with MB-105 could lead to significant breakthroughs in the CAR-T space.”

The Houston-born company, which is a finalist for the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards, continues to accelerate quickly, in part thanks to its home base. After all, existing local investors like TMC Venture Fund also participated in the new raise. As Hein said last year, “Working with partners here in Houston, we have all the pieces and the community rises to the occasion to support you.”

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At Rezvani Lab in MD Anderson Cancer Center, scientists train immune cells to fight cancer. Photo via Getty Images

Unique cell therapy developed in Houston doses inaugural patient

cancer-fighting innovation

Replay, a genome-writing company headquartered in San Diego, has announced that its first patient has been dosed with an engineered T-Cell Receptor Natural Killer (TCR-NK) cell therapy for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

What does that have to do with Houston? Last year, Replay incorporated a first-in-class engineered TCR-NK cell therapy product company, Syena, using technology developed by Dr. Katy Rezvani at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Rezvani, a professor of stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy, is the force behind MD Anderson’s Rezvani Lab, a group of 55 people, all focused on harnessing natural killer cells to combat cancer.

“Everybody thinks that the immune system is fighting viruses and infections, but I feel our immune system is capable of recognizing and killing abnormal cells or cells that are becoming cancerous and they're very powerful. This whole field of immunotherapy really refers to the power of the immune system,” Rezvani tells InnovationMap.

Dr. Katy Rezvani is a professor of stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy and the force behind MD Anderson’s Rezvani Lab, which is focused on harnessing natural killer cells to combat cancer. Photo via mdanderson.org

At Rezvani Lab, scientists train immune cells to fight cancer. While cancer drugs like chemotherapy are still the norm, immunotherapy has gained ground, led by Houston research, including the work of Nobel laureate Jim Allison. The harnessed cells are taught to attack cancerous cells, while ignoring healthy ones, says Rezvani. “We’re turning them into heat-seeking missiles,” she explains.

However, there must be a beacon to signal to those “missiles” that there is something to attack. Much of the field has used chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) to achieve that. But they have limitations.

“CARs can only recognize beacons that sit on the surface of the tumor cells,” Rezvani says. “So basically, it's like the tumor cell has to have a hat on it.”

She says that this usually means that the targets that send off a signal are relatively limited, mostly blood cancers. Using T cell receptors (TCRs) may be able to open up the field to look beyond the “hat.” In other words, TCRs can peer inside cells and see what differentiates a tumor cell from healthy cells. With Replay, Rezvani Lab has developed a first-in-class and first-in-human approach of engineering natural killer cells to express the TCR.

There are six different FDA-approved products that use CAR-T cells, but Rezvani says that her TCR-NK-based technology, though still in its early phases, shows great promise.

“We could use it to target many different types of antigens, many different types of cancers, especially solid tumors," she explains. "These cell therapies have a lot of potential — we call them living drugs… It's not like chemotherapy where you have to keep giving different multiple cycles, these cells are very long lived.”

Rezvani, who started her career in London, says that Houston has been instrumental in the success of her lab.

“There are so many opportunities because we have access to some of the most brilliant minds in research,” Rezvani says. “We have some of the best clinicians in the world. We have patients who come to us who are willing to participate in our clinical trials — really put their trust in us — and are committed and want to participate in these clinical studies.”

The role of funding also plays a part. As Rezvani admitted, bringing a new technology to the market is expensive. The philanthropists who help support trials can’t be forgotten among Houston’s finest.

Whether or not Syena produces the first TCR-NK product on the market, Rezvani is enthusiastic and hopeful for the future of her patients.

“The field of immunotherapy is really expanding, the field of cell therapies is expanding, and there is so much promise,” she says. “The promise of AI, big data, all the engineering tools that we have available, the promise of CRISPR — all of that is going to bring what we've learned from biology, from basic science, together to help us make the cell therapies that are going to be safe and and also very effective for our patients.”

Early-stage cell therapy startup March Biosciences has partnered with CTMC. Photo via march.bio

Cancer-fighting startup partners with Houston cell therapy accelerator

marching on

When it came time to name their cell therapy startup, Houston life science innovators simply had to look to their calendar.

“I would argue that March is the best month in Houston,” Sarah Hein tells InnovationMap. “We started talking about putting this company together during COVID, so we were outside a lot. And we actually got together in March.”

That’s why the CEO and her co-founders Max Mamonkin and Malcolm Brenner decided to name their company March Biosciences.

It's a fresh, unstuffy name for a startup that has an innovative take on cancer immunotherapy. Their lead asset is an advanced cellular therapy known as MB-105, an autologous CD5 CAR T cell therapy. For patients with T-cell lymphoma and leukemia who have failed all currently available lines of therapy, the prognosis is understandably extremely poor. But in a phase one study, MB-105 has been proven to safely treat those patients. The phase two study is expected to begin in the first half of 2024.

Hein met Mamonkin at the TMC Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics (ACT), at which the alumna of Resonant Therapeutics and Courier Therapeutics was an entrepreneur in residence.

“It's a perfect example of the opportunities here in Houston where you can go from bench to bedside, essentially, in the same institution. And Baylor has been particularly good at that because of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy,” says Hein.

The serial entrepreneur first came to Houston as a PhD student in molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine, but during her studies she became excited by the startup ecosystem in her new hometown. After earning her degree, she became a venture fellow at the Mercury Fund. Her experience in both science and business made her an ideal candidate to take March Biosciences to the next level.

In September, the company announced that it formed a strategic alliance with CTMC (Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center), a joint venture between MD Anderson Cancer Center and National Resilience.

“Our unique risk-sharing model allows us to collaborate with organizations like March Biosciences to accelerate the development and manufacture of innovative cell therapies, like MB-105, and bring them into the clinic with a consistent and scalable manufacturing process,” said CTMC’s CEO, Jason Bock in a press release.

The partnership “has allowed us to move really quickly,” Hein says.

That’s because what CTMC does uniquely well is take early stage companies like March Biosciences and advance them to a state that’s ready for manufacturing in a short time, around 18 months, says Hein.

According to Hein, March Biosciences’ success is a testament to Houston and its world-class medical center.

“It’s a great example of the opportunities you see here in Houston, where we have a technology that was developed by brilliant scientists here in Houston and we can pull together the resources that we need to take it to the next level,” Hein says. "Working with partners here in Houston, we have all the pieces and the community rises to the occasion to support you.”

CellChorus, a biotech startup operating out of the University of Houston Technology Bridge, has secured fresh funding. Photo via Getty Images

Houston biotech startup secures $2.3M grant

cha-ching

They say it’s all in the timing. For CellChorus, it’s all in the TIMING. That’s Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy In Nanowell Grids. TIMING is a visual AI program that evaluates cell activation, killing and movement, which allows scientists to better understand how cells function.

The technology is important to the development of novel therapies in the realms of oncology, infectious diseases, and countless other disorders and diseases. By allowing scientists to observe those maladies at their roots, it will enable them to create, and ultimately deliver new medications and other therapies faster, at lower cost, and with a higher success rate.

CellChorus is a spinoff of the Single Cell Lab at the University of Houston. Part of UH’s Technology Bridge, CEO Daniel Meyer connected with co-founder and leader of Single Cell Lab, Navin Varadarajan, through co-founder Laurence Cooper.

“The company had been established, but there were limited operations,” recalls Meyer during a phone call with InnovationMap.

That was the fall of 2020. Now, the team has just announced a $2.3 million SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) Fast-Track grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

“This funding will support development of a product offering that builds on the success of our early access laboratory,” Cooper said in a press release. “As the next frontier of cellular analysis, dynamic single-cell analysis will increase the impact that immunotherapies have in improving the lives of patients.”

Meyer is based in the Bay Area, but the rest of the team is in Houston. Meyer has a proven track record as an investor and early stage entrepreneur in life sciences companies, including work as COO of Genospace, which was acquired by HCA Healthcare.

Meyer says that what attracted him to CellChorus was a combination of a clear need for the technology and the fact that it was “very well validated.“

“Developers of immunotherapies need better functional data earlier so that they can develop and deliver better therapies,” he explains.

Another aspect of its appeal was the fact that more than 10 publications featured data from the TIMING platform.

“We’ve had both large and small biopharmas publish data,” says Meyer. “That’s important as well because it shows there’s applicability in both nonprofit and for-profit research.”

Though Meyer himself doesn’t currently live in Houston, he recognizes its importance to CellChorus. He says that it can be difficult for an early stage company to find appropriate lab space, so Technology Bridge was of exceptional importance for CellChorus. Since opening the lab a year and a half ago, Varadarajan and his team have been busy.

“Example projects we have completed include understanding mechanism of action for cell therapy products, selecting lead candidates for T cell engagers, identifying biomarkers of response to cell therapies, and quantifying potency and viability for cell therapy manufacturing technologies,” says Meyer.

And now, CellChorus is collaborating with leaders in the industry.

“These include top-25 biopharmaceutical companies and promising venture-backed biotechnology companies, as well as leading not-for-profit research institutions,” says Meyer in a press release. It’s clear that the TIMING is right for CellChorus to excel.

Jason Bock, founder and CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to explain the complicated — yet necessary — process of scaling cell therapies. Photo courtesy

Houston innovator aims to scale cancer-curing cell therapies

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 185

It's almost unreal what can be done with therapeutics today, especially in the specialty of cell therapy.

"It feels like science fiction," says Jason Bock, founder and CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, or CTMC, a joint venture between National Resilience and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Cell therapy is essentially personalized medicine, he explains. The process includes taking out a patient’s own immune cells, identifying specifically the T-cells, and engineer them to have them target cancer before expanding them and reintroducing them to the patient.

“The supply chain begins with the patient,” Bock explains on the Houston Innovators Podcast. “If the patient is going to be an integral part of the supply chain, one way to simplify your supply chain is to locate your manufacturing very close to where your patients are.”

That's where CTMC, located in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, comes in. Bock moved to Houston from the East Coast four years to stand up the program at MD Anderson. The founding thesis was to work with faculty members who have interesting ideas for biologics or cell therapies, help them industrialize them, and then bring them into the MD Anderson clinic to evaluate in patients.

Last year, the entity spun out into a joint venture structure with National Resilience, a company that was founded amid the pandemic to build resilience in the nation for complex biologics manufacturing — like vaccines, for instance — in order to expedite the process of getting these treatments to patients.

With access to patients established, how do you address scalability of this treatment in a field that's so customized?

While it might sound like a challenge to scale personalized medicine — it's a worthwhile challenge. Bock says that even though cell therapy is in its early stages still — the first treatment was approved by the FDA just five years ago — early studies have shown patients, who essentially have no other treatment options, can see life-saving results in as little as one treatment.

"We see in a large group of patients — 30 to 50 percent of patients — are cured with one dose," he says on the show.

CTMC has a 60,000-square-foot space two blocks away from MD Anderson. This critical lab space with 14 clean rooms was made available after its previous biotech tenant moved out. The setup can support up to 140 people, and the organization has grown to 80 people over the past few years.

Bock says CTMC is an engine for cell therapy research — one that can take a therapeutic from research to the clinic in about one to two years. Every year, he says CTMC can roll three to five therapeutics into the clinic phase.

And, Houston's an ideal place to do that.

"Houston has a chance to play a role in all aspects of cell therapy," he says, from discovery to the clinical side. "Some really interesting cell therapies that are in development were discovered here in Houston."

Bock shares more on how the impact CTMC is making on cell therapy advancement on the podcast. Listen to the interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.


You can now hop online and invest in this promising cell therapy startup. Photo via Getty Images

Houston biopharma company launches equity crowdfunding campaign

money moves

A clinical-stage company headquartered in Houston has opened an online funding campaign.

FibroBiologics, which is developing fibroblast cell-based therapeutics for chronic diseases, launched a campaign with equity crowdfunding platform StartEngine. The platform lets anyone — regardless of their net worth or income level — to invest in securities issued by startups.

The funding, according to a press release, will be used to support ongoing operations of Fibrobiologics and advance its clinical programs in multiple sclerosis, degenerative disc disease, wound care, extension of life, and cancer.

"We're excited to partner with StartEngine on this campaign. StartEngine has over 600,000 investors as part of their community and has raised over half a billion dollars for its clients," says FibroBiologics' Founder and CEO Pete O'Heeron, in the release.

"This is an exciting time at FibroBiologics as we continue progressing our clinical pipeline and developing innovative therapies to treat chronic diseases," he continues. "This new funding will fuel our growth in the lab and bring us one step closer to commercialization."

The campaign, launched this week, already has over 100 investors, at the time of publication, and has raised nearly $2 million, according to the page. The minimum investment is set at around $500, and the company's indicated valuation is $252.57 million.

In 2021, FibroBiologics announced its intention of going public. Last year, O'Heeron told InnovationMap on the Houston Innovators Podcast of the company's growth plans as well as the specifics of the technology.

Only two types of cells — stem cells and fibroblasts — can be used in cell therapy for a regenerative treatment, which is when specialists take healthy cells from a patient and inject them into a part of the body that needs it the most. As O'Heeron explains in the podcast, fibroblasts can do it more effectively and cheaper than stem cells.

"(Fibroblasts) can essentially do everything a stem cell can do, only they can do it better," says O'Heeron. "We've done tests in the lab and we've seen them outperform stem cells by a low of 50 percent to a high of about 220 percent on different disease paths."


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Rice University launches hub in India to drive education, tech innovation abroad

global mission

Rice University is launching Rice Global India, which is a strategic initiative to expand India’s rapidly growing education and technology sectors.

“India is a country of tremendous opportunity, one where we see the potential to make a meaningful impact through collaboration in research, innovation and education,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches says in a news release. “Our presence in India is a critical step in expanding our global reach, and we are excited to engage more with India’s academic leaders and industries to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.”

The new hub will be in the country’s third-largest city and the center of the country’s high-tech industry, Bengaluru, India, and will include collaborations with top-tier research and academic institutions.

Rice continues its collaborations with institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru. The partnerships are expected to advance research initiatives, student and faculty exchanges and collaborations in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and sustainable energy.

India was a prime spot for the location due to the energy, climate change, artificial intelligence and biotechnology studies that align with Rice’s research that is outlined in its strategic plan Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact.

“India’s position as one of the world’s fastest-growing education and technology markets makes it a crucial partner for Rice’s global vision,” vice president for global at Rice Caroline Levander adds. “The U.S.-India relationship, underscored by initiatives like the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, provides fertile ground for educational, technological and research exchanges.”

On November 18, the university hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Bengaluru, India to help launch the project.

“This expansion reflects our commitment to fostering a more interconnected world where education and research transcend borders,” DesRoches says.

UH-backed project secures $3.6M to transform CO2 into sustainable fuel with cutting-edge tech

funds granted

A University of Houston-associated project was selected to receive $3.6 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that aims to transform sustainable fuel production.

Nonprofit research institute SRI is leading the project “Printed Microreactor for Renewable Energy Enabled Fuel Production” or PRIME-Fuel, which will try to develop a modular microreactor technology that converts carbon dioxide into methanol using renewable energy sources with UH contributing research.

“Renewables-to-liquids fuel production has the potential to boost the utility of renewable energy all while helping to lay the groundwork for the Biden-Harris Administration’s goals of creating a clean energy economy,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in an ARPA-E news release.

The project is part of ARPA-E’s $41 million Grid-free Renewable Energy Enabling New Ways to Economical Liquids and Long-term Storage program (or GREENWELLS, for short) that also includes 14 projects to develop technologies that use renewable energy sources to produce sustainable liquid fuels and chemicals, which can be transported and stored similarly to gasoline or oil, according to a news release.

Vemuri Balakotaiah and Praveen Bollini, faculty members of the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are co-investigators on the project. Rahul Pandey, is a UH alum, and the senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator on the project.

Teams working on the project will develop systems that use electricity, carbon dioxide and water at renewable energy sites to produce renewable liquid renewable fuels that offer a clean alternative for sectors like transportation. Using cheaper electricity from sources like wind and solar can lower production costs, and create affordable and cleaner long-term energy storage solutions.

Researchers Rahul Pandey, senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator (left), and Praveen Bollini, a University of Houston chemical engineering faculty, are key contributors to the microreactor project. Photo via uh.edu

“As a proud UH graduate, I have always been aware of the strength of the chemical and biomolecular engineering program at UH and kept myself updated on its cutting-edge research,” Pandey says in a news release. “This project had very specific requirements, including expertise in modeling transients in microreactors and the development of high-performance catalysts. The department excelled in both areas. When I reached out to Dr. Bollini and Dr. Bala, they were eager to collaborate, and everything naturally progressed from there.”

The PRIME-Fuel project will use cutting-edge mathematical modeling and SRI’s proprietary Co-Extrusion printing technology to design and manufacture the microreactor with the ability to continue producing methanol even when the renewable energy supply dips as low as 5 percent capacity. Researchers will develop a microreactor prototype capable of producing 30 MJe/day of methanol while meeting energy efficiency and process yield targets over a three-year span. When scaled up to a 100 megawatts electricity capacity plant, it can be capable of producing 225 tons of methanol per day at a lower cost. The researchers predict five years as a “reasonable” timeline of when this can hit the market.

“What we are building here is a prototype or proof of concept for a platform technology, which has diverse applications in the entire energy and chemicals industry,” Pandey continues. “Right now, we are aiming to produce methanol, but this technology can actually be applied to a much broader set of energy carriers and chemicals.”

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

Houston innovator drives collaboration, access to investment with female-focused group

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 262

After working in technology in her home country of Pakistan, Samina Farid, who was raised in the United States, found her way to Houston in the '70s where business was booming.

She was recruited to work at Houston Natural Gas — a company that would later merge and create Enron — where she rose through the ranks and oversaw systems development for the company before taking on a role running the pipelines.

"When you're in technology, you're always looking for inefficiencies, and you always see areas where you can improve," Farid says on the Houston Innovators Podcast, explaining that she moved on from Enron in the mid-'80s, which was an exciting time for the industry.

"We had these silos of data across the industry, and I felt like we needed to be communicating better, having a good source of data, and making sure we weren't continuing to have the problems we were having," she says. "That was really the seed that got me started in the idea of building a company."

She co-founded Merrick Systems, a software solutions business for managing oil and gas production, with her nephew, and thus began her own entrepreneurial journey. She came to another crossroads in her career after selling that business in 2014 and surviving her own battle with breast cancer.

"I got involved in investing because the guys used to talk about it — there was always men around me," Farid says. "I was curious."

In 2019, she joined an organization called Golden Seeds. Founded in 2005 in New York, the network of angel investors funding female-founded enterprises has grown to around 280 members across eight chapters. Suzan Deison, CEO of the Houston Women's Chamber, was integral in bringing the organization to Houston, and now Farid leads it as head of the Houston Chapter of Golden Seeds.

For Farid, the opportunity for Houston is the national network of investors — both to connect local female founders to potential capital from coast to coast and to give Houston investors deal flow from across the country.

"It was so hard for me to get funding for my own company," Farid says. "Having access to capital was only on the coasts. Software and startups was too risky."

Now, with Golden Seeds, the opportunity is there — and Farid says its an extremely collaborative investor network, working with local organizations like the Houston Angel Network and TiE Houston.

"With angel investing, when we put our money in, we want these companies to succeed," she says."We want more people to see these companies and to invest in them. We're not competing. We want to work with others to help these companies succeed."

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