The funding will fuel the growth of Immunai’s proprietary AI-first single-cell drug discovery platform
Immunai, a New York and Tel Aviv based biotech company, announced today $60M in funding, increasing the company’s total funding-to-date to over $80M. Immunai integrates multi-omic single-cell analytics and machine learning to identify novel immunological insights that lead to the discovery and development of more effective and targeted immunotherapies. The Series A round was led by Schusterman Family Investments, Duquesne Family Office, Catalio Capital Management, and Dexcel Pharma, with additional participation from existing investors Viola Ventures and TLV Partners.
Immunai will use these funds to expand AMICATM, its proprietary Annotated Multi-omic Immune Cell Atlas, the largest such database in the world. Immunai’s ability to successfully annotate and characterize single cells at high resolution provides the potential for unprecedented insights into the regulation and function of the immune system in disease. AMICA improves as it grows, enabling Immunai to unlock insights currently trapped in partners’ biobanks. Immunai will also extend its functional genomics capabilities to reprogram immune cells and validate targets to better support discovery, prioritization, and development of new therapies and drug combinations.
“The immune system is implicated in nearly every illness, making our technology critical for identifying, diagnosing, and treating disease, from cancer and infectious disease to autoimmune disorders,” remarked Noam Solomon, Immunai’s co-founder and CEO. “Since Immunai’s founding in 2018, we have been mapping the immune system through observational genomics, using multi-omic single-cell technologies and machine learning to better understand how the immune system operates. Our expansion into functional genomics will help our partners tackle their most pressing questions in therapy development and will ultimately improve the lives of many patients.”
By partnering with pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic leaders and building its own pipeline, Immunai is poised to answer the most pressing questions in immuno-oncology, cell therapy, infectious disease, and autoimmunity, including key biology driving clinical endpoints and target discovery.
“It’s increasingly clear that the immune system is even more complex than we imagined, and advancing our understanding requires combining new techniques with big data approaches,” notes Dr. Kenan Turnacioglu, General Partner at Catalio Capital Management, who recently joined Immunai’s Board of Directors. “This intersection is reflected in Immunai’s founding team and leadership, and I’m excited to be working with the company on this next phase of growth, as they bring together the brightest minds in the fields of single-cell genomics, immunology, machine learning, and data engineering to take on this task.”
The company has repeatedly demonstrated the value of its platform in an immunotherapy setting, having characterized a CAR-Natural Killer T (NKT) infusion cell therapy product developed at the Baylor College of Medicine for use in neuroblastoma patients. In a paper published in Nature Medicine, Baylor researchers and Immunai demonstrated the heterogeneity of CAR-NKT cells in their first-in-human trial. Baylor and Immunai have recently identified a gene potentially involved in CAR-NKT-mediated antitumor activity and are working to validate this target. This work has led to other strategic collaborations in the immunotherapy space where Immunai is partnering to develop new cell therapy candidates in solid tumors.
“We’ve developed a novel platform to reprogram immunity by mining AMICA, our proprietary harmonized single-cell immunology database, with cutting-edge transfer and multi-task learning algorithms,” said Luis Voloch, co-founder and CTO. “Our vertically integrated functional genomics and AI capabilities allow us to prioritize and validate targets more accurately.”