ImmuneBridge

United States - San Francisco, California

• 13/04/2023
• Seed
• $12,000,000

ImmuneBridge is developing allogeneic immunotherapies for cancer. Our core technology drives the expansion of cord blood derived immune stem cells and establishes a novel, flexible, consistent and abundant cellular source for immunotherapies. We are currently pursuing natural killer cell products for hematological malignancies. Next we will use the unique advantages of our cellular source to tackle solid tumors.

Platform

ImmuneBridge is creating a platform of scalable allogeneic immune cell therapies from cord blood. Our proprietary technology, including a novel small molecule, expands cord blood HSPCs over 100,000-fold while maintaining full immune multipotency, with the ability to differentiate into cell types including NK cells, T cells and macrophages.

Pipeline

In the near term, our goal is to validate the economic and clinical benefits of our expansion technology by taking an expanded-HSC-derived NK cell to clinical trials for hematological malignancies. In the long term, our unique access to the modified and unmodified immune tree allows us to tackle the challenge of solid tumors with combinations of modified cells.

Agile Discovery

This agile and flexible allogeneic platform reduces costs of discovery and manufacturing, expanding commercially viable indications for cellular immunotherapy. Starting from cord blood has speed and cost advantages over iPSCs, including the ability to quickly match HLA types to target populations or select beneficial genotypes without the need to edit those features into a clonal iPS line. This enables rapid iterations of abundant and consistent sources of therapeutic cells.

Related People

Peretz PartenskyCo Founder

United States - Oakland, California

YC founder, team builder, serial entrepreneur, and immunology devotee. UCSF PhD in biochemistry/epigenetics. Product and people specialist. Professional generalist.

Born in Siberia. Soviet refugee. High School Drop Out. Educated in Boston. Polished at Cambridge University. Doctored in San Francisco. Served as a science diplomat in Beijing. Coached basketball in Afghanistan. Hunted with eagles in Kyrgyzstan. Arrested and represented self in court in Kazakhstan. Published author. Father of three lion cubs.

► Skills

1. Science - PhD research in epigenetics, chromatin biochemistry, and underlying mechanisms of cell identity maintenance
2. Healthcare - VP of Product & Data at Optum/Anthem funded value-based healthcare company.
3. Entrepreneurship - Co-founder of companies that have raised $100M+ in aggregate. Built and scaled teams from 0 to 30+ employees. Successfully hired away entire NASDAQ PM software team.
4. Engineering & Product leadership - Managed a team of up to 7 engineers for 3 years. Responsible for critical product with high-uptime requirements that moved >$100M over three years.
5. Communication - Most-read author on Medium for the week, on two separate occasions. Published in Wired, N+1 magazine. My photos have appeared in over a dozen newspapers online and print magazines, including WSJ, Wired, Fast Company, Vice, Biz Insider, Mashable, HuffPo.
6. Dedication - Hiked 230 miles along John Muir Trail with 50,000 ft of elevation gain/loss in 10 days.

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/peretzpartensky/