Cell therapy company Link Cell Therapies is launching with $60 million and a mission to develop potent CAR-T therapies that go after a range of tumors while avoiding patients' healthy tissue.
The Stanford University spinout’s $60 million series A financing was led by Johnson & Johnson’s VC organization, according to a Dec. 15 release. The round included backing from Link’s founding investors Samsara BioCapital and Sheatree Capital, plus Bristol Myers Squibb and Kyowa Kirin, among others.
Since its 2022 founding, the California biotech has raised a total of $92 million in seed and series A cash, according to the release.
Link touts “logic-gating technology” designed to enable higher precision for the safer deployment of CAR-T compared to current therapeutics.
“We recognized that for most cancer types, particularly solid tumors, the promise of CAR-T therapies is limited by a dearth of cancer-specific targets and abundant expression of most solid tumor targets in normal vital tissue,” Link co-founder Robbie Majzner, M.D., associate professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, said in the release.
"Link is advancing a technology that we developed while at Stanford University that allows for logic-gated CAR-T cell control,” the former Stanford instructor Majzner continued, referring to his work conducted with fellow co-founder Crystal Mackall, M.D., professor of pediatrics and medicine at Stanford.
“The Link-based CAR activates and kills target cells only when a combination of antigens is co-localized on the tumor, thereby bypassing normal tissues that express only one of those targets,” Majzner explained. “We believe this approach will enable potent CAR-T therapies to attack a wide range of tumors while sparing healthy tissue.”
The platform's safety features are designed to create novel “clean” target pairs and enable next-gen CAR-Ts for both solid and liquid cancers.
Link's lead program, coded LNK001, is currently in preclinical development for renal cell carcinoma (RCC), with the biotech anticipating phase 1 dosing to start sometime next year, according to the release.
The biotech’s second program, which takes aim at colorectal cancer, is slated for in-human testing in 2027.
Link hosts earlier CAR-T programs in solid and liquid cancers that the biotech says will be developed internally or via partnerships.