Granza Bio Raises $7M Seed to Unlock the Therapeutic Potential of Immune System Attack Particles
July 3, 2024
Granza Bio, a biotechnology company founded by researchers at the University of Oxford, has raised $7.14 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Felicis Ventures and Refactor Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and other investors including Metaplanet, Zeno Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, Oxford Angel Fund, and North South Ventures. The company will use the funding to advance its discovery of attack particles as a novel therapeutic modality and develop its precision delivery platform that can direct a range of therapeutic cargoes — including RNAs, proteins, and the attack particles themselves — to specific tissues and disease sites.
Granza Bio was founded by Dr Ashwin Nandakumar (CEO), Dr Ashwin Jainarayanan (CSO), and Professor Michael Dustin, a world-leading authority on molecular immunology at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford. The scientific foundation of the company lies in Dustin's laboratory's discovery of attack particles — a distinct category of the immune system's arsenal that had not previously been characterised as a therapeutic tool. Attack particles are membrane-bound vesicles released by cytotoxic immune cells that carry a potent payload of cell-killing machinery. Unlike the cells that release them, attack particles can be collected, engineered, and delivered as an off-the-shelf product rather than requiring the complex, patient-specific manufacturing processes that limit the accessibility of cell therapies today.
The therapeutic vision is ambitious. Attack particles combine two attributes that have previously been difficult to achieve simultaneously in cancer treatment: the potency of cellular immunotherapy, which has demonstrated dramatic efficacy in specific haematological cancers, and the manufacturing simplicity of antibody-based drugs, which are produced in standardised processes and can be administered to any patient without personalised manufacturing. Granza Bio's attack particles have shown cancer-killing efficacy in preclinical studies of glioblastoma, ovarian, lung, and skin cancers. Beyond oncology, the same platform has potential applications in autoimmune diseases, where the immune response needs to be modulated rather than amplified, and in infections, where pathogen-infected cells must be eliminated.
A central challenge in realising this potential is delivery. Getting therapeutic cargo to the right tissues and cell types while avoiding off-target effects and immunological activation by the delivery vehicle itself are engineering problems as much as biological ones. Granza Bio's platform is specifically designed to address these delivery challenges, developing a library of engineered shells that can encapsulate different therapeutic cargoes and direct them with specificity to target sites. Zal Bilimoria, founding partner at Refactor, noted that the team's combination of fundamental immunology expertise and industrial manufacturing experience is what distinguishes Granza as a delivery platform company rather than a discovery-stage research project.
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