Kanvas Biosciences, Princeton, NJ-based spatial biology company, raised additional $12.5M in funding.
The round, which brought the total amount to $29.5M, was led by DCVC and Lions Capital LLC, and participation from FemHealth Ventures, Germin8, Ki Tua Fund, and Pangaea Ventures as well as existing investors. Paul Theunissen, Managing Partner at Lions Capital Partners LLC, will join the company’s Board, and Ashlie L Burkart, MD, Chief Scientific Officer of Germin8 Ventures, will join as a board observer.
The company intends to use the funds to further develop its spatial biology platform and advance two novel therapeutics in its Immuno-oncology Program, KAN-001 and KAN-003 — KAN-001 to an Investigational New Drug (IND) filing in 2025.
Led by CEO Matthew Cheng, Kanvas Biosciences is a spatial biology company building a microbiome drug screening, discovery and manufacturing platform to accelerate the development of live biotherapeutics. With an ability to spatially map the microbiome and profile host gene expression, and manufacture complex consortia containing hundreds of members that can restore microbiome health, the company is positioned to develop novel therapeutics that can improve the lives of all patients living with microbiome-associated diseases. Its technology was initially developed at Cornell University and exclusively licensed.
KAN-001, the company’s lead drug candidate, is an LBP demonstrating significant potential to improve outcomes for cancer patients who have been resistant to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). Designed with the goal of increasing the percentage of patients who respond to ICIs across all ICI-approved cancer types, KAN-003 will be a defined consortium for cancer patients, administered just before starting ICI treatment. Kanvas is collaborating with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and its Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research (PRIME-TR) to conduct additional preclinical studies for KAN-001 to optimize the drug’s formulation and prepare it for an IND filing in 2025, preparatory to recruiting the first patients for a clinical trial the same year.
FinSMEs
01/07/2024