Tactiva Therapeutics Secures $35 Million Series A Financing to Advance DEACT Platform into Clinical Development

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned from foreign media that on December 3, 2018, U.S. local time, Tactiva Therapeutics (“Tactiva”), an innovative immunotherapy company in the R&D stage, announced it had raised $35 million in Series A financing and closed the first tranche of the round. The financing was led by Panacea Ventures, with participation from Vi Ventures and Efung Capital.

The newly injected capital will be used to advance the clinical development of Tactiva’s Dual-Enhanced Adoptive Cell Therapy (DEACT) platform, which is primarily designed for the treatment of multiple myeloma and several solid tumors. The core principle involves extracting pre-existing immune cells from the patient’s blood, followed by genetic expansion and enhancement during ex vivo culture, before reinfusing the engineered cells back into the patient to combat cancer cells.

Image source: Tactiva website

Tactiva’s Dual-Enhanced Adoptive Cell Therapy (DEACT) platform consists of engineered CD4/CD8 cells that generate a durable supply of CD4+ T cells with direct antitumor activity and provide sustained help to CD8+ T cell-derived, TCR-transduced effector T cells.

Tactiva was founded in 2017 and is headquartered at the University at Buffalo (UB) in New York State. Tactiva is also a partner of UB’s Institute for Genomic Data Analytics (BIG). The University at Buffalo provided significant support during Tactiva’s early stages, including funding from UB’s Center for Big Data and Advanced Technologies in Health Sciences.

Matthew Colpoys, CEO of Tactiva, stated, “This investment enables us to actively advance our clinical development program and demonstrate the efficacy of our TCR approach.”

“We are delighted to support Tactiva in its next-generation immunotherapy initiatives. Advancing personalized medicine is a key driver of the Buffalo life sciences ecosystem and a focal point of the BIG Initiative,” said Christina Orsi, Vice President at the University at Buffalo.

The BIG Initiative, launched by New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, is one of the key measures designed to leverage life sciences assets to drive economic growth and help build an innovation-based economy in the region. Established primarily to provide eligible companies in the region with support for advanced analytics applications, access to genomic expertise, and partnerships with biomedicine and healthcare industry firms, the initiative aims to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare outcomes.

In October of this year, Dr. Kunle Odunsi, co-founder of Tactiva, was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, which is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. His election was attributed to his “identification of key mechanisms of immune suppression within the ovarian tumor microenvironment, pioneering redesign of mature T cells and hematopoietic stem cells for adoptive T-cell therapy, and gaining developmental recognition through the implementation of multi-institutional immunotherapy trials using novel strategies, thereby influencing treatment outcomes and quality of life for patients with ovarian cancer.”

Founded in 2017 and headquartered at the University at Buffalo in New York State, USA, Tactiva is an innovative therapy company in the research and development stage. Its flagship product is a Dual-Enhanced Adoptive Cell Therapy (DEACT) platform, primarily designed for the treatment of multiple myeloma and select solid tumors.