Compass Therapeutics, a Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company committed to comprehensively drugging the human immune system, closed the final $49m tranche of its $132m Series A financing.
The round was led by OrbiMed Advisors and included F-Prime Capital, Cowen Healthcare Investments, Thiel Capital, Biomatics Capital, Ulysses Holdings, Borealis Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Biomed Realty Ventures.
This financing will enable the company to advance its antibody-based therapeutics into the clinic.
Led by Thomas Schuetz, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder and chief executive officer, and and Piotr Bobrowicz, Ph.D., chief scientific officer, Compass is advancing a new approach to identifying antibody drug candidates that engage all targets in the biologically complex human immune synapse, with an initial focus on T cells, NK cells and macrophages. The company’s antibody discovery and bispecific engineering platforms enable the rapid identification of therapeutic candidates that engage with a broad range of epitopes on every target. Specifically, StitchMabs™, a novel and proprietary high-throughput bispecific screening platform, enables the rapid identification of synergistic bispecific activity.
Compass is capable of drugging two new targets per month, and therapeutic candidates are generated in less than two months from antigen to candidate set. To date, the integrated R&D approach has generated therapeutic candidates for more than 30 targets in cancer, inflammation and autoimmune disease.
The company has more than 15 therapeutic candidates advancing through preclinical development and has filed more than 50 patent applications.
CTX-471, the company’s leading immuno-oncology candidate, is in late IND-enabling studies and is expected to enter the clinic in the first half of 2019.
Compass is also focused on drugging targets at the intersection of the innate and the adaptive immune response. By screening all discovery sets for both activating and inhibiting signaling, Compass is developing a set of novel therapeutics to induce tolerance in patients with autoimmune diseases.
FinSMEs
12/07/2018