Dive Brief:
- Kyverna Therapeutics, a cell therapy startup backed by Gilead Sciences, has extended a Series B round, adding $60 million to a financing that now totals $145 million.
- New backers Bain Capital Life Sciences and GordonMD Global Investments joined Gilead, founding investors Westlake Village BioPartners and Vida Ventures and others to provide the new funds, which will support development of cell-based medicines for autoimmune diseases.
- Kyverna emerged with a focus on “Treg” cell therapies, which it and several other companies are pursuing as a new way to attack inflammatory conditions. But according to CEO Peter Maag, the company later changed its strategy, licensing a program that uses more conventional cell therapy technology and is in early-stage testing for lupus.
Dive Insight:
Since Kyverna’s launch three years ago, “Treg” cell therapy has become a competitive area of drug research.
The approach harnesses regulatory T cells, a different type of immune cell than the ones in Gilead’s marketed cancer cell therapies. These Tregs could be used to help shield the body from the malfunctions that cause inflammatory conditions, opening up new diseases to cell therapy.
Regeneron, AstraZeneca, and Bristol Myers Squibb are also investing in, or partnering with, startups pursuing such treatments.
Treg cell therapy research remains early, however. One of the most advanced treatments, from Sangamo Therapeutics, has reached human testing. The startups following behind will need time and money to reach similar milestones.
Kyverna’s shift in strategy shows how they might get there.
Maag joined Kyverna near the end of 2022 to lead a “strategic pivot,” he said in an email to BioPharma Dive. The company had earlier secured rights from the National Institutes of Health to a drug that, like many cell therapies for cancer, aims at a protein called CD19. That drug was safe enough in an early lymphoma trial that it appeared a good candidate for autoimmune diseases like lupus, a disease in which CD19 is also implicated. (Another CD19-directed cell therapy showed promise against lupus in a study published in Nature Medicine last year.)
Kyverna has taken that drug forward, beginning early-stage studies in lupus in the U.S. and Europe that could produce results later this year. It’s also developing a more convenient, off-the-shelf version of the treatment, and envisions both as treatments for “multiple” autoimmune diseases, according to Maag.
The results will be important for Kyverna’s future. The company’s future financing options, including a potential initial public offering, will be “facilitated by” those studies, which will begin to read out data later this year, Maag said.
In the meantime, its Treg cell therapy work is “in [the] research stage and will take more time to mature into a clinical program,” he said.