Novel cell therapy company Cimeio Therapeutics is exiting stealth mode—though its science isn’t. The Versant Ventures-backed company has publicly entered the industry with a $50 million series A financing round.
The applied gene editing, cellular and immunotherapy company is developing shielded-cell and immunotherapy pairs to transform treatment for rare genetic diseases, hematologic malignancies and autoimmune disorders. Cimeio’s technology is designed to enter a stealth mode to shield healthy transplanted cells while the immunotherapies deplete diseased cells. Because the transplanted cells are protected, immunotherapy can continue to be safely administered post-transplant.
“We’re not just trying to bend the survival curve on tough diseases a little bit,” Thomas Fuchs, CEO at Cimeio, told Fierce Biotech. “We think we can transform the natural history progression of a lot of diseases. This is a big swing we’re taking.”
Cimeio is the most recent startup to emerge from Versant’s Ridgeline Discovery Engine in Basel, Switzerland. Versant’s $50 million commitment makes up the initial funding round, with more investors expected to join the next round, Alex Mayweg, Ph.D., managing director at Versant and Cimeio board member, said in an interview. Versant has finances that can carry Cimeio through 2023 and beyond, Mayweg said, noting the firm typically plans to build out company breadth and that often includes participating in several rounds of financing.
Cimeio’s initial focus is a new approach to hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplants and adoptive cell therapy (ACT). Currently, HSC transplants are the only curative treatments for multiple life-threatening diseases, but many patients are ineligible because it requires intensive chemotherapy and radiation conditioning. Targeted therapeutics that have recently emerged on-scene as potential alternatives have fallen short, lacking sufficiently selective targets.
“We believe our technology platform has the potential to significantly improve HSC transplant and will one day allow it to be given as an outpatient procedure in some circumstances,” said Fuchs.
The company expects to have a clinical candidate ready for its lead program by the end of this quarter, according to Fuchs.
Cimeio—based in Basel, Switzerland and Boston—consists of 20 employees and an additional 15 Ridgeline staff members. The company has grown quickly from last year, when there were only a handful of dedicated workers, and there are plans for continued expansion.
“The idea was different than anything I’d ever seen—nobody else has put together cell conditioning and gene editing in this way. It was immediately apparent to me how it could be useful,” Fuchs said of Cimeio’s technology, which pulled him from Roche's Genentech unit, where he had led the hematology franchise. He said he also admired the Ridgeline Discovery Engine’s power to incubate companies and rapidly move ideas into the lab.
Other industry leaders that have joined Cimeio’s leadership team include Stefanie Urlinger, Ph.D., a protein engineering expert with past experience at Morphosys and iOmx; Daniel Stark, Ph.D., former head of manufacturing science and technology at Novartis Cell & Gene Therapies; Thomas Winkler, M.D., who spent years conducting research at the National Institute of Health and later led studies at Agios and AstraZeneca; Tristan Imbert, previous senior vice president and chief financial officer at Novartis Gene Therapies; and academic founder Lukas Jeker, M.D., Ph.D., professor of experimental transplantation immunology and nephrology at the University of Basel.
Fuchs believes Cimeio’s technology has significant therapeutic potential and, if successful, could be used in areas beyond HSC transplant and ACT.
Versant focuses on biotechnology companies discovering and developing novel therapeutics, with $4.2 billion currently under management and more than 25 companies in its portfolio right now. The venture capital firm unveiled Century Therapeutics in 2019 with a $250 million financing round—with $215 million from Bayer venture arm Leaps by Bayer—to take allogeneic cell therapies into the clinic.