New funding: Notch Therapeutics has raised a $85 million Series A round, bringing its total funding to $91 million. The biotech company was founded in 2018 and is developing stem cell-derived immunotherapies for cancer.
Seattle expansion: The startup has offices in Vancouver, B.C. and Toronto and will use some of the new capital to open a facility in Seattle, adding another player to the city’s growing biotech scene. Notch currently has 35 employees, with plans to grow that number to 100 by the end of 2022. About 20 of those jobs will be in Seattle, where it is opening a research laboratory, with the possibility of expanding into regulatory and clinical functions.
Biotech innovation: The company is developing a biotech platform that can take renewable stem cell lines and manipulate their development to turn them into T cells and other types of immune cells used in therapies. The company’s Engineered Thymic Niche platform is so named because it mimics actions of the human thymus, causing cells to differentiate into specialized cell types.
Companies such as California’s Fate Therapeutics are also developing T cells from similar sorts of stem cells, but Notch officials said their technology is special because of its ability to control T cell development without using a separate feeder cell line or animal reagents.
The startup is collaborating with Allogene Therapeutics to develop a treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma.
