With $29.5
million in total funding, the company has developed the
world's leading spatial biology platform, designed for
breakthroughs in drug development, clinical diagnostics,
agriculture, and food safety. This proprietary mapping technology
will first be used to leverage the microbiome - a critical factor
in human health – in order to manufacture a therapeutic with
significant promise for improving outcomes in ICI-refractory
cancers.
PRINCETON, N.J., July 1, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- Kanvas Biosciences, a full-stack spatial biology
company, today announced it has raised $12.5
million in additional funding co-led by existing investors
DCVC and Lions Capital LLC, and participation from FemHealth
Ventures, Germin8, Ki Tua Fund, and Pangaea Ventures as well
as existing investors. Paul
Theunissen, Managing Partner at Lions Capital Partners LLC,
will join the company's Board, and Ashlie L Burkart, MD, Chief
Scientific Officer of Germin8 Ventures, will join as a board
observer. The fresh capital closely follows a June 2023 round and brings Kanvas's total funding
to $29.5 million. The funding will be
used to further develop the company's spatial biology platform and
advance two novel therapeutics in its Immuno-oncology Program,
KAN-001 and KAN-003 — KAN-001 to an Investigational New Drug (IND)
filing in 2025.
![Kanvas Biosciences (PRNewsfoto/Kanvas Biosciences) Kanvas Biosciences (PRNewsfoto/Kanvas Biosciences)](https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2444134/KanvasLogo_Logo.jpg)
The Kanvas platform is unique in its ability to spatially map
gene expression and cellular function across all kingdoms of life.
Its unprecedented capability to illuminate host-microbiome
interactions marks a significant advancement in understanding
diseases related to the microbiomes, finally unlocking the promise
of microbiome-based therapies. The platform provides not only a
path to breakthroughs in drug development, but also clinical
diagnostics, agriculture and food safety.
Kanvas Bioscience's spatial biology platform provides the unique
ability to map host-microbiome interactions and leverage the
resulting data to design live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), which
can be used to create novel microbiome-based therapies that
optimize the microbiome – a critical factor in human health.
KAN-001, the company's lead drug candidate, is an LBP demonstrating
significant potential to improve outcomes for cancer patients who
have been resistant to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs).
Designed with the goal of increasing the percentage of patients who
respond to ICIs across all ICI-approved cancer types, KAN-003 will
be a defined consortium for cancer patients, administered just
before starting ICI treatment. Kanvas is collaborating with The
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer
Center and its Platform for Innovative Microbiome and
Translational Research (PRIME-TR) to conduct additional preclinical
studies for KAN-001 to optimize the drug's formulation and prepare
it for an IND filing in 2025, preparatory to recruiting the first
patients for a clinical trial the same year.
"We have a remarkable opportunity to help patients by offering
them an effective, novel therapeutic approach to some of the most
common and debilitating conditions, starting with improving the
efficacy of immunotherapy in the treatment of solid organ cancer.
I'm so proud of the extraordinary progress the Kanvas team has
already achieved," said Matthew
Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Kanvas Biosciences. "Because of
this progress and with additional capital, Kanvas is positioned to
accelerate its growth and build on its early success in
illuminating host-microbiome interactions by launching a clinical
pipeline of precision microbiome therapeutics."
With a market expected to grow at a 21% CAGR to over
$3 billion by 2031, LBPs are living
microbes and can improve treatment outcomes for
microbiome-addressable conditions, including solid organ cancer,
inflammatory bowel disease and metabolic disorders. By acting in a
synergistic and complementary manner to existing therapies, LBPs
provide a safe method for targeting underlying disease processes,
but through different pathways and with greater efficacy.
Historical approaches to LBP development have generally focused on
single strains of bacteria – which don't have an appropriate
ecosystem to add therapeutic value – or fecal microbiota
transplants (FMTs), which are complex and consist of many bacterial
strains, but are difficult to scale commercially, highly variable
and cannot be optimized. Kanvas has demonstrated the ability to
develop and manufacture complex microbial consortia of 148
bacterial strains, providing the benefits of a complex community
with multiple mechanisms of action, which make LBPs more
effective.
"Not only does Kanvas's spatial biology platform offer
much-needed discovery capabilities, it also now enables the
manufacturing of complex LBPs as a therapeutic modality. KAN-001
and KAN-003 have the potential to be breakthrough, complementary
therapeutics for ICI-refractory and ICI-naive cancers," said
Jason Pontin, General Partner at
DCVC and chair of Kanvas's board. "By providing the missing link
between microbiome drug design rationale and therapeutic outcomes,
Kanvas has the unique and exciting ability to provide a better
mechanistic understanding of microbiome-addressable conditions, and
ultimately improve clinical success for the next generation of
LBPs."
"I'm thrilled to support Kanvas's mission as a board observer,"
remarked Dr. Burkart, Germin8's Chief Scientific Officer and a
board-certified pathologist specializing in gastrointestinal
pathology. "Their exceptional team and groundbreaking technology
will revolutionize our understanding of host-microbiome
interactions, driving transformative discoveries in human health
and beyond. This tool isn't just relevant for human health; it
holds promise for sectors like animal health and agriculture.
Understanding microbes in these areas is vital for global health
and sustainability."
The past 12 months have been a period of momentous growth for
Kanvas. This fall, the company opened a new research laboratory and
drug manufacturing facility in South San Francisco. Kanvas also
recently expanded its leadership team: Lee
Swem, formerly Federation Bio's Chief Science Officer,
joined Kanvas as Chief Development Officer, Steve Kujawa, who previously led business
development at 10x Genomics, joined as Vice President of Business
Development, and Kevin Cutler joined
the company as Lead Scientist with expertise in AI. Swem is driving
the execution of Kanvas's LBP portfolio, with a focus on KAN-001,
and Kujawa is leading partnerships for the company's spatial
biology platform and licensing of non-core LBP assets. Cutler is
spearheading the curation of a state-of-the-art training database
for machine learning segmentation of microbes, development of deep
learning models for spectral identification of microbes, and
integration of advanced AI into the company's analytical
platform.
For more information on Kanvas Biosciences or to inquire about
pharmaceutical discovery partnership opportunities, visit
https://www.kanvasbio.com/.
About Kanvas Biosciences
Kanvas Biosciences is a
spatial biology company building the world's first microbiome drug
screening, discovery and manufacturing platform to accelerate the
development of next generation live biotherapeutics. With an
unparalleled ability to spatially map the microbiome and profile
host gene expression, and manufacture complex consortia containing
hundreds of members that can restore microbiome health, the company
is uniquely positioned to develop novel therapeutics that can
significantly improve the lives of all patients living with
microbiome-associated diseases. Kanvas Biosciences' technology was
initially developed at Cornell
University and exclusively licensed. The company's notable
investors include DCVC, Lions Capital LLC, FemHealth Ventures,
Germin8, Ki Tua Fund, and Pangaea Ventures. Kanvas Biosciences is
headquartered in Princeton, NJ.
For more information, visit www.kanvasbio.com or follow the
company on LinkedIn.
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