On July 15th, CellOrigin Biotech, a company committed to iPSC-derived innate immune cell therapeutics, has announced a new round of investment by Kunlun Capital. The investment will be used for the CMC development for its current pipeline of iPSC-derived innate immune cells such as iPSC-CAR-Macrophage. Before, CellOrigin have also acquired investment from Shulan Health and Nest. Bio Ventures.

CellOrigin Biotech has a long term focus on iPSC-derived innate immune cells and its applications in new cancer immune cells. Dr. Jin Zhang, the scientific co-founder of CellOrigin used to be trained as a research fellow at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His team worked closely with clinicians at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and for the first time reported the induced pluripotent stem cell or iPSC-derived CAR-macrophages (CAR-iMac), and its applications in cancer immunotherapies.

As for now, CellOrigin Biotech holds its proprietary technologies for iPSC-derived CAR-Macrophage. With this platform, they are collaborating with research groups in genome engineering and synthetic biology at Harvard and MIT to fully unleash the potential of iPSC-derived immune cells, which are highly editable, expandable and clonal. Eventually, they would like to achieve a goal of bring more effective, universal and safe immune cell products to cancer patients, especially for those with solid tumors. The investigator initiated trials has been initiated at the First Hospital of Zhejiang University. The core proprietary technology platform and the core patents including the engineered macrophages from pluripotent stem cells has been authorized and is in the process of entering the US, Australia, South Africa, etc.