Therapies made from a patient’s own immune cells have spurred medical miracles for many people with advanced blood cancers, but getting those CAR-T cell therapies to work more broadly in solid tumors has proven trickier than scientists imagined. A new startup thinks it has a solution.
Waypoint Bio has developed a new method to test in mice hundreds of different designs of cell therapies at a single time. By using cutting-edge spatial biology techniques, it hopes to pinpoint exactly where the cell therapies get stuck when trying to attack tumors, and to improve the designs that work the best.
The New York-based startup has raised $14.5 million in seed funding to refine its screening technology and begin developing CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumors, including gastric, liver and pancreatic cancer, it told Endpoints News exclusively.
“We’re focused on a few solid tumors where there’s really well-known challenges,” such as breaking through the thickets that surround tumors or avoiding the immunosuppressive defenses that cancers throw up, co-founder and CEO Xinchen Wang told Endpoints.
The startup is a reunion for Wang and his co-founder (and former roommate) David Phizicky. The two met as biology graduate students at MIT, and did their postdocs at Columbia and Yale, respectively, before founding Waypoint in 2021.
At Waypoint, they’ve built technology that combines two broad approaches for gathering large amounts of data from a single experiment: Pooled screening — the concept of testing many things at once rather than one by one, and spatial biology — which reveals detailed molecular maps to uncover subtle differences between cells in a tumor.
“There are certain phenotypes that you simply can’t screen for unless you’re using a spatial approach,” said Phizicky, the startup’s chief scientific officer.
The company is designing hundreds of cell therapies based on published experiments and its own ideas to find which combinations of genetic tweaks work best together. It aims to assess many things at once, such as the ability of the engineered T cells to infiltrate tumors, kill cancer cells, and engage with hard-to-see tumors that have low levels of a cancer antigen.
“It’s not just what is good and what is bad, but if something isn’t perfect, why is it not perfect?” Wang said. The company will use artificial intelligence to analyze images from the experiments, figure out where the therapies are falling short and direct their next set of designs. “It’s an iterative process that we’re really excited by,” he added.
It plans to pick a lead cell therapy to move forward by the end of 2025 or early 2026, and file an application to begin clinical trials after that, Wang said. The startup also hopes to develop regulatory T cell therapies for autoimmune diseases.
The funding was led by the generalist seed investor Hummingbird Ventures, which has recently backed biotech startups Amber Bio and Enveda Biosciences. Other firms, including health-focused Recode Ventures and early-stage tech investor Fifty Years pitched in too.
The startup’s scientific advisory board includes two scientists working on CAR-T cell therapies: Robbie Majzner of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Yvonne Chen of UCLA. Biotech entrepreneur and investor Ron Lennox, and Broad Institute scientists Melina Claussnitzer and Shantanu Singh are on the board too.