A nimble Houston startup has raised a concise $28.4 million Series A to start a mid-stage trial.
The company, named March Biosciences, will enter Phase 2 early next year with an autologous CAR-T cell therapy for relapsed and refractory CD5+ T cell lymphoma, it said Wednesday morning. CEO Sarah Hein told Endpoints News its total financing to date of $51 million will fund the startup to Phase 2a data but won’t fully fund all of Phase 2, which will take place at multiple sites in the US.
The candidate, MB-105, went through a Phase 1 at Baylor College of Medicine and showed an overall response rate of 44%, with two complete responses, according to a publication in Blood in March. “The people who understand how difficult [T cell lymphoma] is understand that you typically just don’t see responders, much less long-term survivors. So that led to a lot of excitement,” Hein said.
Mission BioCapital and 4BIO Capital led March’s Series A. Austin-based KdT Ventures also took part, as did Alexandria Venture Investments, Modi Ventures, Mansueto Investments, TMC Venture Fund, Cancer Focus Fund, Small Ventures, Portal Innovations and Volnay Therapeutics. Volnay is a stealth-stage cell therapy venture studio led by Stefan Wildt and Nebojsa Milovic.
March said it will work with Volnay to create manufacturing processes for MB-105 for both clinical development and potential commercialization. Hein pointed out Wildt and Milovic’s work on helping launch Novartis’ cell therapy Kymriah and helping build the “cell engine at Takeda.”
The four-employee startup operates out of Portal Innovations, a life sciences investor and lab operator. Hein declined to comment on the future path for its other pipeline programs, including CD7 autologous CAR-T MB-107, allogeneic multi-CAR MB-112 and MB-301, whose target is undisclosed.
Hein co-founded the company in 2022 after helping recruit researchers to the cancer therapeutics accelerator at Texas Medical Center Innovation. Prior to that, she was VP of operations at another Houston cancer biotech called Courier Therapeutics, which was bought by Valo Health for up to $510 million in 2021, according to her LinkedIn bio.
March traces back to chief scientific officer Maksim Mamonkin and Malcolm Brenner, a Baylor professor behind other CAR-T projects, including collaborations with Celgene and bluebird bio. Brenner was also involved in now-shuttered Singapore cell therapy company Tessa Therapeutics.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify the funding will get the company to Phase 2a data.