Immunai announced Thursday $60 million in new funding, making it better poised to answer the most pressing questions in immuno-oncology, cell therapy, infectious disease and autoimmunity.
The company, based in New York with its research and development arm located in Tel Aviv, has raised $80m. so far.
Immunai is on a mission to reprogram the immune system to advance personalized medicine to better detect, diagnose and treat diseases, company co-founder Noam Solomon told The Jerusalem Post. It does it through its AMICA (Annotated Multi-omic Immune Cell Atlas) database composed of data from a diverse group of the world’s top hospitals that has been harmonized so it can be used for clinical purposes.
AMICA is the largest proprietary data set in the world for clinical immunological data; Immunai has mapped out millions of immune cells and their functions.
According to a release, “Immunai integrates multi-omic single-cell analytics and machine learning to identify novel immunological insights that lead to the discovery and development of more effective and targeted immunotherapies” in its own wet lab in New York City.
Single cell analysis enables scientists to measure tissues on a cell-by-cell level, Israeli-born Solomon explained. The resolution is so precise that cellular mechanisms and the quantification of cell-to-cell differences can be deciphered.
As an illustrative example: a milkshake that is composed of 20 fruits and milk.
“You taste it and you see it is bitter, but you are not sure what is making it bitter. Is it the grapefruit or was the banana bad, or perhaps there is some reaction between the milk and the orange?” Solomon asked. “Single cell allows you to measure every fruit separately from within the milkshake.”
This way, he said, “you can learn much more.”
The $60m. Series A funding round was led by Schusterman Family Investments, Duquesne Family Office, Catalonia Capital Management and Dexcel Pharma, with additional participation from existing investors Viola Ventures, TLV Partners and Gefen Capital.
Immunai will use these funds to expand AMICA and better enable Immunai to extend its functional genomics capabilities to reprogram immune cells and stimulate immunological responses to validate novel targets to better support discovery, prioritization and development of new therapies and drug combinations.
“The immune system is implicated in nearly every illness, making our technology critical for identifying, diagnosing and treating diseases, from cancer and infectious diseases to autoimmune disorders,” Solomon stressed.
He said through Immunai’s vertically integrated platform, scientists can better understand why patients respond or don’t respond to specific therapies.
“What is right for John is not necessarily right for Michelle,” he said. “Over time, we hope to be able to explain mechanistically why certain immune profiles respond to certain therapies and others don’t, and these explanations lay the foundations to novel diagnostics and therapeutics”
Solomon continued: “We are trying to get people from a state of disease to a state of health. Our technology is able to suggest new treatment paths and to discover new targets for novel therapies.”
Recently, the company characterized a CAR-Natural Killer T (NKT) infusion cell therapy product developed at the Baylor College of Medicine for use in neuroblastoma patients. Immunai and the college have recently identified a gene potentially involved in CAR-NKT-mediated antitumor activities and are working to validate this target.
Solomon holds two doctorates from Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and did his postdoctoral work at Harvard and MIT. His co-founder, CTO Luis Voloch is also from MIT. They partnered with Dr. Ansuman Satpathy, a cancer immunology professor at Stanford, Dr. Danny Wells, who previously worked at Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, and Prof. Dan Littman, a professor at New York University. They work together with a multidisciplinary team of 70 top scientists and engineers.
“Our expansion into functional genomics will help our partners tackle their most pressing questions in therapy development and will ultimately improve the lives of many patients,” Solomon concluded.