Manu­fac­turing cancer-killing T cells inside the body

When one of the companies you’ve financed is advancing rapidly toward commer­cial­izing what’s possibly the most conse­quen­tial cancer therapeutic in history, you’re allowed to take a minute to feel excited. And that’s how we feel today at DCVC Bio.

Umoja Biopharma, which we’ve backed since 2019, announced today that it’s closed a $100 million Series C financing round, co-led by us here at DCVC Bio and Double Point Ventures.

The round included an impressive collection of new and existing co-investors, including ARK Invest, Cormorant Asset Management, MPM Capital, Qiming Venture Partners USA, RTW Investments, Alexandria Ventures, CaaS Capital, Yosemite, K12 Health Ventures, Myeloma Investment Fund, and the University of Minnesota Endowment Fund.

At its core, Umoja’s technology vastly improves on traditional CAR‑T therapy, a treatment that beats back blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma by engineering a patient’s own T cells to produce chimeric antigen receptors that help them find and kill tumor cells. The process has cure rates as high as 80 percent, but it’s slow, traumatic, and expensive. It requires extracting a patient’s own T‑cells, editing their genes in the lab to give them the new receptors, expanding the population of custom T cells, depleting the patient’s own immune cells through chemotherapy (a process called lymphode­ple­tion), and then reinfusing the engineered cells, all at a base cost of more than $400,000 per infusion. Umoja, by contrast, invented a viral delivery system, inspired by the human immun­od­e­fi­ciency virus, that puts the new genes into a patient’s cells, inside the body. This in vivo approach skips over the extraction, expansion, and lymphode­ple­tion steps and tasks a patient’s own cells with generating the needed CARs, which makes it far faster and cheaper than traditional CAR‑T therapy.

Last year Umoja became the first company to receive FDA clearance to try in vivo CAR‑T engineering in humans, and it will soon dose its first patients in two separate trials, for candidate therapies known as UB-VV111 and UB-V400. AbbVie agreed to pay up to $1.44 billion for the exclusive rights to market Umoja’s first five cell therapies, including UB-VV111 and UB-V400.

The new funding will fuel the company’s work on both the AbbVie-supported therapies and further therapies. Rather than having to develop a new chimeric antigen receptor for each type of cancer, Umoja has developed a universal CAR that recognizes fluorescein residues, which can be built into small-molecule tags that stick to specific antigens on a tumor’s surface. Umoja has already demon­strated this technology in humans, by engineering T cells ex vivo to express the universal CAR; the next step is to try it in vivo against other cancer types.

What’s most exciting about Umoja’s technology is that it promises to vastly increase patient access to the power of CAR‑T therapies. As an exercise, we put together a map of Chicago showing which hospitals within 100 miles of the downtown have the clinical facilities needed to administer traditional CAR‑T therapy. There were only two. But Umoja’s treatment can be initiated by any clinic capable of giving an IV infusion — which expands the map to 30 hospitals.

CAR‑T is an amazing technology, but by going in vivo and turning patients’ own cells into drug factories, we’ll be able to bring this conse­quen­tial therapy to a far larger group of cancer sufferers — at a much more competitive cost.