Orca Bio raises $192M in Series D round for effort to replace bone marrow transplants

A company developing allogeneic cell therapies for blood cancers, autoimmune diseases and genetic diseases has raised nearly $200 million in its latest funding round.

Menlo Park, California-based Orca Bio said Wednesday that it had raised $192 million in a Series D funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and another investor that wasn’t disclosed. Other investors that took part in the round included 8VC, DCVC Bio, ND Capital, Mubadala Investment Company, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Kaiser Permanente Group Trust and IMRF.

Health IT

Reducing Clinical and Staff Burnout with AI Automation

As technology advances, AI-powered tools will increasingly reduce the administrative burdens on healthcare providers.

By Dr. Michael Blackman, Chief Medical Officer at Greenway Health

The funding round, which brings the total amount of money Orca has raised to nearly $300 million since it was launched in 2016, will be used to develop its pipeline of cell therapies and its manufacturing technology, which involves optimizing therapeutic mixtures of immune and stem cells by sorting blood at the single-cell level.

The company is focused on developing cell therapies that would serve as alternatives to conventional allogeneic bone marrow transplants, which are commonly used to treat diseases like blood cancers, but often come with severe complications, notably graft-versus-host disease.

The company’s lead product candidate is TRGFT-201, which is in a Phase I/II study of 84 patients with blood cancers, including acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome. According to the ClinicalTrials.gov database, the study started in November 2019 and is expected to complete in the fall of 2022. The idea behind that program is that it uses an “extremely pure” dose of regulatory T cells designed to temper the immune system’s reaction. In another program that is earlier in clinical development, OGFT-001, each T-cell subtype is controlled and formulated in a mixture to allow for control of the patient’s new immune system.

“Replacing bone marrow transplants is a logical first step in next-generation allogeneic cell therapy,” Orca CEO Ivan Dimov said in a statement. “While a conventional bone marrow transplant administeres an uncontrolled cell product, Orca Bio has been the first to deliver a high-precision cell therapy.”