Tessa Therapeutics closes US$126 million Series A financing round

KUALA LUMPUR, June 10 (Bernama) -- Tessa Therapeutics Ltd (Tessa), a clinical-stage cell therapy company developing next-generation cancer treatments for hematological malignancies and solid tumours, has announced the close of a US$126 million Series A financing round. (US$1 = RM4.397)

Polaris Partners led the financing with participation from existing investors, including Temasek, EDBI, Heliconia Capital and Heritas Capital. In conjunction with the financing, Amy Schulman and Darren Carroll, Managing Partners at Polaris Partners, have joined Tessa’s Board of Directors.

Tessa plans to use the proceeds from the financing to advance the ongoing clinical development of the company’s autologous CD30-CAR-T therapy (TT11) and allogeneic CD30.CAR EBVST therapy (TT11X) programs. The CD30-CAR-T clinical trial supplies will be manufactured in Tessa’s newly qualified state of the art commercial cGMP facility.

“We are very pleased to have secured this significant round of financing from such a highly regarded syndicate of global healthcare investors, including Temasek and Polaris Partners,” said Göran Ando, M.D., Chairman of the Board of Tessa Therapeutics in a statement.

“Additionally, we are excited to welcome Amy Schulman and Darren Carroll of Polaris to our Board of Directors and look forward to benefitting from their substantial industry experience and business acumen as Tessa enters an important period of growth as we advance our pipeline of revolutionary cell therapies through the clinic to patients in need.”

Meanwhile, Schulman said: “We are delighted to lead this financing in Tessa Therapeutics to enable the acceleration of the company's corporate and clinical development activities. Tessa is at an exciting point with two differentiated clinical-stage programs pursuing novel approaches for the treatment of CD30-positive lymphomas. We look forward to working with the Tessa team and the Board of Directors in developing the next generation of cancer cell therapies.”

Tessa’s lead program TT11, is an autologous CD30 chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy that harvests the patient’s own T-cells and modifies them to target cancer cells expressing the CD30 protein, a well-validated lymphoma target.

For more information, visit www.tessacell.com.

-- BERNAMA