Former Juno Therapeutics executives Hans Bishop and Steve Harr have launched Sana Biotechnology, a startup focused on cell therapy, gene therapy and gene editing.
Backed by ARCH Venture Partners, Flagship Pioneering and F-Prime Capital Partners, the new company is notable not just for its experienced leadership team, but also the amount of funding it is looking to raise out of the gates.
Sana is reportedly working on a series A funding round with the goal of raising between $800 million and $1 billion, according to Axios.
That amount of capital would make the company one of the most heavily-funded biotech upstarts in the Seattle area since — yep, you guessed it: Juno Therapeutics.
Juno — a spin out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute — raised $264 million in an initial public offering in 2014 just a year after it was founded with capital from Arch Venture Partners, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and others. A developer of CAR T immunotherapies to genetically reprogram a patient’s immune cells, Juno was sold to Celgene last year for $9 billion, an amazingly quick payoff for investors.
