Kanvas Biosciences, a full-stack spatial biology company has secured $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.
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The fresh capital closely follows a June 2023 round and brings Kanvas Biosciences’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.
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“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.”
The Kanvas platform is uniquely poised for the spatial mapping of gene expression and cellular function across all kingdoms of life, providing an unprecedented capability to illuminate host-microbiome interactions. This edit brings vast changes to comprehension with regard to microbiome-associated diseases and finally opens up the promise for microbiome-based therapies. More than that, it opens up ways for breakthroughs in the development of drugs, clinical diagnostics, and sustainable agriculture, together with food safety.
“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.”
About Kanvas Biosciences
Foundedin 2020, 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.
