Juno Therapeutics, a Seattle, WA-based biotech company focused on developing immunotherapies for cancer, has raised an additional $31m in Series A funding, closing the round at $176m.
Juno’s initial funding of $120m came from ARCH Venture Partners and the Alaska Permanent Fund, through a partnership managed by Crestline Investors (read here). In January 2014, we covered an additional $25m from included Bezos Expeditions and Venrock (read here).
Led by Hans Bishop, CEO, and newly appointed Mark W. Frohlich, M.D., (Executive Vice President of R&D) and Barney Cassidy (General Counsel), Juno is a clinical stage company that brings together three cancer centers (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute) to advance a pipeline of potential curative immunotherapy treatments. It will develop two distinct and complementary platforms – chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and T-cell receptors (TCRs).
The CAR technology is designed to target cell surface antigens that are expressed on cancer cells while the high-affinity TCR technology can detect alterations in intracellular proteins present in tumor cells.
FinSMEs
25/04/2014