Actym Therapeutics, a privately-held immuno-oncology company, announced today the completion of a $34 million series A financing led by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) and Panacea Venture, with participation from Illumina Ventures, Korea Investment Partners (KIP), and JLo Ventures. The company will use the proceeds to advance development of immunotherapies from its microbial-based STACT platform into the clinic for the treatment of various cancers. Actym is led by industry veterans Christopher Thanos, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, Laura Hix Glickman, Ph.D., Vice President Research, and Mark Frohlich, M.D., Chief Medical Advisor.
With the close of the Series A financing, the Actym Board of Directors has expanded to include Kanad Das, Ph.D., Investment Director at BIVF, James Huang, MBA, Founding Managing Partner of Panacea Venture, and Alexis Ji, Ph.D., Partner at Illumina Ventures.
“Patients burdened with metastatic disease desperately need new and effective treatment options. Actym’s platform technology allows for the delivery of multiplexed immunological payloads to the tumor microenvironment (TME) after IV dosing, in a single therapeutic composition. This financing, from an esteemed group of investors, is a key validation of our approach,” said Dr. Thanos. “Our goal is to bring therapeutic benefit to cancer patients. We are fortunate to be aligned with investors who can provide both the financial resources and real-world leadership experience to help build Actym, advance our pipeline, and ultimately help patients.”
“On behalf of BIVF, we are excited to co-lead the investment in Actym. Actym’s unique approach has the potential to overcome the immunosuppressive TME and treat a broad range of malignancies via a systemic route of administration.” said Dr. Das, of BIVF.
“Actym has developed a highly differentiated therapeutic platform. We are excited about its potential and are impressed by the scientific depth of the team. We are thrilled to co-lead the investor syndicate and our team looks forward to helping Actym develop potent immunotherapies.” said Mr. Huang.
About Actym
Actym Therapeutics is based in Berkeley, California and was founded in 2017 by Christopher Thanos Ph.D., Laura Hix Glickman, Ph.D., and Amit Kumar, Ph.D. The company has developed a microbial-based immunotherapy platform called STACT (S. Typhimurium Attenuated Cancer Therapy). In preclinical studies, STACT specifically enriches in many types of solid tumors and not in healthy tissue. Once there, STACT delivers multiplexed immuno-modulatory payloads directly to tumor-resident immune cells. Many of these payloads are of significant interest to the biopharmaceutical community but are intractable using conventional approaches due to systemic toxicities after IV dosing. Furthermore, STACT has been engineered to deliver payload combinations, which facilitates engagement of multiple biological pathways from a single therapy.
