As the wave of in vivo CAR-T hype crests, Create Medicines is catching the swell with a $122 million series B meant to back its early pipeline of autoimmune and cancer candidates.
Originally launched in 2021 as Myeloid Therapeutics by cell therapy pioneers Ronald Vale, Ph.D., and Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D., the latter of whom is also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books on cell biology and cancer, the company rebranded in 2023 to reflect its expanding ambitions.
The series B was led by past supporters Newpath Partners, ARCH Venture Partners and Hatteras Venture Partners, according to a May 14 release, with Alexandria Venture Investments and others also getting in on the fun.
“Our autoimmune and oncology pipeline represents the convergence of years of platform development, clinical execution and translational learning,” Create CEO Daniel Getts, Ph.D., said in the release. “We believe our ability to engineer multiple immune cell populations directly in vivo has the potential to fundamentally reshape treatment paradigms across autoimmune disease and oncology.”
While Create’s autoimmune pipeline is entirely preclinical, it has dosed more than 50 patients in trials of its cancer candidates, which the company calls the “largest clinical dataset in the field.” Many other in vivo CAR-T companies have recently been bought with much less clinical data available, like Kelonia Therapeutics by Eli Lilly and Interius BioTherapeutics by Gilead.
Create’s approach is to use mRNA to turn cells in patients’ bodies against their disease, be it cancer cells or overactive immune cells. The Massachusetts-based biotech’s cancer programs primarily focus on engineering myeloid cells, such as macrophages, hence the company’s former name. The autoimmune programs, in contrast, target T cells.
mRNA is a transient way to generate engineered cells in the body, compared to the permanent editing provided by virus-based approaches.
Last month, Create dosed the first patient in its phase 1/2 study of MT-304 in solid tumors. MT-304 is designed to bestow myeloid cells and natural killer cells with the ability to seek and destroy tumor cells expressing HER2, a common marker of various cancers.
Create’s lead autoimmune program targets CD19 on the surface of B cells in order to wipe out B cells that have gone haywire and reset the immune system.
“Most in vivo cell therapy companies will struggle to translate science into scalable manufacturing. Create owns its manufacturing infrastructure,” Tom Cahill, M.D., Ph.D., Create co-founder and founder and managing partner of Newpath Partners, said in the release. “I am backing Create because it can become the next great standalone pharmaceutical company.”