Waypoint Bio, a biotechnology company has raised $14.5 million in seed funding led by Hummingbird Ventures with participation from other institutional investors, including Recode Ventures and pre-seed lead Fifty Years.
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Waypoint will use its seed financing toward first designing CAR T-cell therapies with superior efficacy against the tumor microenvironment, and later, Treg therapies for autoimmune diseases.
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“Pooled screening is an incredibly powerful technology for drug discovery, but it’s historically been limited to measuring simple cell phenotypes, such as growth or drug resistance. This limits the technology’s value in more complex diseases where interactions between cells and their environment are key, including T cell interactions with solid tumors in cancers,” said Xinchen Wang, PhD, Co-founder and CEO. “Our platform turbocharges traditional pooled screening by leveraging spatial biology to generate complex, multivariate and spatial readouts for every perturbation, helping us quickly generate novel drug candidates with a greater probability of clinical success.”
“We built our platform so that we could start our discovery process directly in mouse models, skipping the in vitro step while still testing cell therapy designs at high-throughput and lower cost,” said David Phizicky, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. “This scale of in vivo testing allows us to screen many more innovative cell therapy designs with higher potential for clinical translatability. Using spatial biology, we’re able to read out not only which assets show efficacy in vivo, but also why these assets succeed or fail, and which assets match the phenotypes observed from patient samples. This level of detail presents a potential leap forward in cell therapy design.”
About Waypoint Bio
Founded in 2021 by Xinchen Wang and David Phizicky, Waypoint Bio uses ultra-high resolution spatial multi-omics and is powered by proprietary approaches using computer vision, cell therapy design, and pooled screening. These novel capabilities solve critical issues around understanding how cell therapies navigate the three-dimensional tissue architecture including tumor microenvironments and allow the measurement of cell-to-cell and cell-to-environment interactions.
With an iterative cycle that continuously learns and improves, Waypoint Bio aim to rationally design and develop more effective and safe solid tumor cell therapies providing medical teams and their patients novel treatment options to combat cancer and autoimmune diseases.
