Gritstone Oncology, a San Francisco, CA- and Cambridge, MA-based cancer immunotherapy company developing personalized cancer therapeutics, raised $102m in Series A financing.
The round was co-led by Versant Ventures and The Column Group, with participation from Clarus Ventures, Frazier Healthcare Partners, Redmile Group, Casdin Capital, and Transformational Healthcare Opportunity, a special-purpose vehicle for private investors.
The company intends to use the funds for the discovery and development of novel tumor-specific neo-antigen (TSNA) based immunotherapies, with an initial focus on lung cancer.
Led by Andrew Allen, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder, president and CEO, Gritstone Oncology will focus initially on discovering and developing TSNA-based therapies for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
The company’s other co-founders include Drs. Tim Chan and Naiyer Rizvi, who pioneered this work for lung cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Professor Jean-Charles Soria of the Institut Gustave Roussy, Paris, an international lung cancer expert and drug developer; Professor Graham Lord of King’s College London, a clinician-scientist in the field of lymphocyte biology; and Dr. Mark Cobbold of Massachusetts General Hospital, an expert in antigenic-peptide binding and recognition by T cells.
FinSMEs
20/10/2015