New Delhi Immunal Therapeutics Pvt Ltd, co-founded by Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, raised approximately $15 million ( 116 crore in a Series A funding round co-led by Eight Rhodes Ventures, True North and F-Prime Capital with participation from existing investors).
Founded in 2019, Immuniel has raised nearly $28 million to date from venture capital firms as well as individuals, Shaw pointed out. vCircle In a conversation, a relatively significant amount for a biotech startup from which venture capital firms have traditionally and largely stayed away from India largely due to their capital-intensive business and lack of exit visibility.
Immunal focuses on accessing chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy (CAR-T) and other cellular immunotherapies for the management and treatment of cancer. The startup has also announced India’s first phase II patient trial for CAR-T cancer treatments. These therapies are available internationally for over $350,000 per dose, making Immunil’s Imagine trial the first step towards bringing global quality and affordable treatments with clinical data to patients in India.
“The CAR-T space and cell and gene therapy are very attractive areas of investment around the world and when we say we want to put India on the map for CAR-T, it appeals to a lot of investors who want to invest in it. India’s biotech space,” said Shaw.
Furthermore, in addition to Shaw as co-founder of Immunil, his co-founders – US oncologist and Pulitzer winner, Siddhartha Mukherjee and venture capitalist, Kush Parwar – come with their share of credibility.
“They (investors) knew what we were doing and we have the global network to do the right thing. Having said that, what we have raised is not a huge amount of capital,” she explained.
However, the next round of funding, which it wants to raise within a year, is expected to be larger and at a higher valuation, she added, without disclosing further details.
Immunal’s director and chief operating officer Arun Anand said the new capital will be used to further its clinical trials and scale up manufacturing.
A portion of the fund will also be used to invest in digital technology.
Investing in digital technology helps to gain more insight into how cell therapy can be done and how to track and trace its autologous therapies, explained Anand, who previously worked in Indian medicine. The chief was accompanied by Dr Reddy’s.
Autologous therapy is a newer therapeutic intervention that uses a person’s cells or tissues, processed outside the body and re-introduced into a donor. The digital framework helps to bring all the elements of clinical fabrication data into one analytical platform, “which is an important aspect of our work,” he said.
Elaborating on the Clinical II trials, Anand said the startup hopes to be able to enroll patients faster and has a waiting list of patients who want to undergo trials at hospital chain Narayana Health. This is a very specialized area and has traditionally not required a large clinical trial and is closely tied to regulators to understand how quickly it can follow through with testing. It is also looking at ways to see if it needs another small clinical trial to gain regulatory approval.
Shaw explained that Immunil’s idea was conceived when his co-founders discussed how India is nowhere on the CAR-T map and yet China is moving ahead. He also pointed out that Biocon’s group company Syngene was already tinkering with CAR-T, but that setting up a new company was a better idea. Shortly after, Anand became involved with the idea. She also said that the idea was to start the company within a hospital and thus chose Narayan Health, because the Mazumdar Shaw Center for Translational Research, which aimed to develop scientific breakthroughs, is also located in the hospital.
The startup also created a scientific board that included names such as Carl June, who is credited with developing T-cell therapies for CAR-T, Bruce Levine, who is credited with developing T-cell therapy for CAR-T cells; and Nupur Raje, a translational researcher, and director, Center for Multiple Myeloma, among others.
Shaw also said that he started Immunil with a consortium of philanthropic capital and hence received capital from hospital groups such as Manipal, Apollo, Narayan Health as well as Pankaj Patel of pharmaceutical firm Zydus. “We also realized we needed VC capital for the next round of funding and found Eight Roads and F-Prime, who work closely with us,” he added. It also got investment from Khosla Ventures.