A new startup is working towards using a patient’s own genetic makeup to fight cancer.
Catamaran Bio, a startup at LabCentral in Cambridge, was established to consider the potency of natural killer (NK) cells in fighting cancer, and so far, it has raised $42 million from five venture capital companies including the founding investor, SV Health Investors, of Boston.
“This was a group of people who had wanted to do something together for a long time,” said Houman Ashrafian, managing partner of SV Health Investors.
Immunotherapy drugs such as Kymriah, Novartis’s leukemia therapy, have shown promising results for the treatment of blood cancers. The approach, also called CAR-T therapy, relies on harvesting patients’ T cells and genetically altering them to target the cancer after they are reintegrated into the patient’s genetic makeup. Earlier in 2020, researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Centre announced they achieved a “73% response rate with a CD19-targeting therapy derived from donated cells in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.” This demonstrates the efficiency of the cancer-eliminating process.