CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ImmuneID, Inc., a precision immunology company employing a proprietary platform to identify and therapeutically target antibody interactions that drive immune diseases, announced a $17M financing led by founding investor Longwood Fund, as well as Arch Venture Partners, Pitango HealthTech, In-Q-Tel, Xfund, and others. The company plans to use this funding to develop therapeutic programs in areas including severe allergy, autoimmunity, oncology, and infectious disease.
“High-quality therapeutic target identification has remained a vexing bottleneck in drug discovery,” said Stephen Elledge, Ph.D., ImmuneID co-founder, Lasker Award winner, and Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “The ImmuneID platform, including the VirScan technology, relieves this bottleneck by using its massively parallel, multiplexed, and unbiased approach to provide previously unavailable insight into human immune responses throughout the course of disease progression.”
ImmuneID’s platform is a robust, patented, and well-validated system that makes use of next generation sequencing, robotic automation, and artificial intelligence to interrogate and ultimately drug the immune system. The Elledge Lab has optimized the platform through years of intensive research and development resulting in multiple articles in leading journals such as Science and Cell.
“ImmuneID is committed to therapeutically leveraging the powerful data we have generated to create new medicines for patients with severe allergies, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and infectious disease,” said Longwood Fund’s Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., ImmuneID co-founder and Executive Chair. Lea Hachigian, Ph.D., founding CEO of ImmuneID, and Principal, Longwood Fund, added, “We are also applying our platform to generate real-time deep insights into public health risks, and other severe diseases.”
The power of the VirScan technology was recently highlighted in Shrock et al., Science 10.1126/science.abd4250 (Sept. 29, 2020), in which deep serological profiling of 232 COVID-19 patients and 190 pre-COVID-19 era controls revealed over 800 epitopes in the SARS-CoV-2 proteome, including 10 high-quality epitopes likely recognized by neutralizing antibodies. ImmuneID’s broader platform was employed in Monaco et al., Nat Commun 12, 379 (2021), to identify strong anti-wheat IgE reactivities in wheat allergic individuals and characterize a key wheat epitope that elicits dominant IgE responses among allergic patients, opening the door to targeted therapeutics.
ImmuneID’s Scientific Advisory Board includes co-founder Stephen Elledge, Ph.D.; co-founder H. Benjamin Larman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Pathology, Johns Hopkins; co-founder Tomasz Kula, Ph.D., Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University; and Michael Mina, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
About ImmuneID
ImmuneID is a precision immunology company using its proprietary platform to simultaneously identify and therapeutically target millions of antibody interactions that drive immune diseases. Based on technology developed by scientific founders Stephen Elledge (Harvard), Ben Larman (Johns Hopkins), and Tomasz Kula (Harvard), we are employing our massively parallel, multiplexed, and unbiased systems to develop therapeutics for autoimmunity, severe allergy, oncology and infectious disease. ImmuneID was founded in 2020 by Longwood Fund and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
