If we look through the human history for a second, one thing we’ll be quick to notice is that human beings have learnt a lot of lessons over the years. However, despite the high volume in play, our most important lesson to this day continues to revolve around the need to keep an open mind. You see, by doing so, we have understood that, no matter how far we get, we’ll always stand a chance at achieving something even better. We have enough examples at our disposal to substantiate the said lesson, including a certain much-talked about creation called technology. Ever since arriving on the scene, technology has been breaking the world’s boundaries left, right, and center; therefore segwaying us into a reality where nothing is really out of our reach. Such a dynamic, as anyone would guess, would go on to guide us towards some unprecedented achievements. Notably enough, though, clocking those heights won’t spell a wrap for the creation. It will stay on an upwards trajectory, and that will bring some interesting by-products into the fold, with one more seemingly set to join the party on the back of a recent funding.
Cancer biotech company, Indapta Therapeutics has officially raised a sum worth $50 million in a recently-concluded Series A funding round. According to a few relevant reports, the round was co-led by RA Capital Management, Vertex Ventures, and Leaps by Bayer. Nevertheless, what deserves a little more attention is how Indapta plans on using the latest cash injection. Through a Natural Killer cells approach, the company wants to build a brand of cancer treatment, which addresses much more cancer permutations than, let’s say, a therapy constructed from patient’s own T cells will ever do. Natural Killer cells exhibit some serious potential due to multiple reasons. For starters, unlike T cells, these don’t require any special activation process. Apart from it, NK cells are also found to secrete signaling proteins called cytokines that are best-known for recruiting other immune cells, thereby bolstering the patient’s overall immune response.
Indapta, in fact, reportedly uses a more advanced version of NK cells. Known as G-NK cells, these are collected from healthy donors and are found to not mandate any genetic engineering. This dramatically reduces the costs involved, making the Natural Killer cells an attractive prospect on the financial front as well.
As far as practical performance is concerned, Indapta’s G-NK cells have, so far, proven capable to handle a multiple myeloma mouse model. When the cell therapy was combined with an antibody drug for myeloma called daratumumab, it produced a tumor reduction, which was 99.9% bigger than the findings we observed after combining the drug with conventional NK cells.
“I’m excited to bring this off-the-shelf cell therapy to the clinic, where we have the potential to demonstrate it can benefit patients without the toxicities associated with currently approved cell therapies,” said Mark Frohlich, CEO of Indapta Therapeutics.
