Philip Greenberg has been trying to stop cancer for decades. With Affini-T Therapeutics, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center investigator may finally have his chance.
The company announced $175 million in funding last week to move cell therapies developed by Greenberg and his colleagues into the clinic.
Greenberg, based in Seattle, has co-founded biotech companies before. But none have advanced the anti-cancer technology he helped develop through clinical trials. He’s learned some lessons along the way, and he co-founded Affin-T Therapeutics with the aim of finally seeing clinical success.
“I’m a little late in my career now. And I wanted to see this through,” he told GeekWire in an interview.
The approach involves removing a patient’s T cells and engineering them to make a molecule that recognizes cancer cells, a T cell receptor (TCR). The cells are infused back into the patient where they bind to cancer cells and kill them.
In the early 1990s Greenberg co-founded Targeted Genetics. But it was “too early” for the technology to succeed, said Greenberg, and the company folded in 2009.
In 2013, Greenberg co-founded Juno Therapeutics with other immunotherapy researchers. The Seattle company became a juggernaut, selling to Celgene five years later for more than $9 billion. But Juno ultimately developed a different type of therapy, T cells engineered with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR).
