With nearly two million new cases and a million deaths each year in India, the war against cancer is amongst the most pressing crises in the country. Over the years, Eight Roads has had the privilege of partnering with companies who are working towards building weapons to help fight this war, for example, in India, Laurus Labs, amongst the world’s largest manufacturer of generic oncology active pharmaceutical ingredients and CORE Diagnostics, one of the country’s leading providers of high end oncology diagnostics. Now, with our investment in Immuneel, there is an opportunity to build the first cutting-edge oncology therapeutics platform focussed on the Indian population.
What is CAR-T therapy?
Immuneel has been founded with the aim of delivering cellular immunotherapies like CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor-T cells) for the management of cancers, at a price point that would enable relatively widespread access across the country.
The treatment of cancer with traditional drugs often proves inadequate, as tumour cells can find refuge in hard to access locations and then mutate to build resistance, leading to cycles of remission and relapse. CAR-T therapies, where patients are infused with live immune cells that have been genetically programmed to specifically target cancer, offer a more responsive option capable of hunting tumour cells down to their last remnants.
Globally, the two marketed products by Novartis and Gilead, have begun to gain traction in select markets like the US despite their exorbitant pricing, as evidence mounts from a growing base of patients who have achieved lasting remissions from otherwise terminal diseases. Sadly, these therapies are unavailable in India, though the country has already established the tertiary healthcare infrastructure required for administering these treatments (~1900 bone marrow transplants were performed in India last year, a procedure that requires nearly comparable clinical infrastructure).
Immuneel and its ambitions
The company is targeting a range of CAR-T programs, including next generation therapies, to capture the full potential of this therapeutic modality. First generation therapies target blood cancers, and efforts are now ongoing to address the broader base of solid tumours.
There is also work being done on optimizing the mix of cell types infused into patients to increase efficacy and create an improved memory function for long term targeting of tumour cells that manage to survive the initial immune onslaught. Another major stream of research on CAR-T therapies is the potential for allogenic treatments. While therapies today involve the collection and re-infusion of a patient’s own immune cells, allogenic therapy would enable cells from a given donor to be used across a range of patients, thereby significantly lowering production cost and operational complexity.
The founding team
Immuneel has been put together by an exceptional set of founders including Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, one of the leading figures in our biopharmaceutical industry, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist with the Columbia University Medical Center and a Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, and Dr. Kush Parmar, an experienced biotech entrepreneur and Managing Partner at Boston-based 5AM Ventures. With their support, the company has access to some of the leading CAR-T programs worldwide, an ability to establish relationships with relevant stakeholders in the Indian healthcare ecosystem and the reach to create a world-class team. Operations at the company’s state-of-the-art R&D and manufacturing facility in Bangalore are helmed by a handpicked team of scientists, led by Dr. Arun Anand, a seasoned bio-therapeutics professional.
These are still early days in the evolution of CAR-T and other cellular immunotherapies, with leading signs indicating that they could provide a vital weapon in the fight to contain cancer. We are excited to support Immuneel in its mission to save lives with breakthrough therapies, and build a company with the potential to galvanize the next wave of innovation in the biotech landscape.
