Local biotech firm receives nearly $19 million in new funds

Local biotech firm ImmunoScape has received a capital injection of US$14 million (S$18.7 million) to bring its total funding in the past year to US$25 million.

Singapore's EDBI, the Economic Development Board's corporate investment arm, led the latest fund-raising round, ImmunoScape said yesterday.

This was the first time a Singapore institutional investor has been involved in ImmunoScape.

EDBI, which is investing alongside existing investors Anzu Partners from the United States and The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, tapped its Special Situation Fund for Start-ups.

This fund helps new firms sustain innovation and entrepreneurship activities and bridge the financing gap they face amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

ImmunoScape conducts research into the immune system in areas such as immuno-oncology, which involves developing treatments that use the body's immune system to fight cancer.

It also recently announced a new study here on how T cells - a critical component of the immune system - respond to fight Covid-19 infection in vaccinated individuals.

The new funding will be used to enlarge ImmunoScape's Singapore-based team, further its expansion into the US and scale up its newly announced San Diego laboratory.

These new funds will also increase ImmunoScape's capacity for in-house research and development as well as expand its partnerships with other biopharmaceutical and drug development companies.

Chief executive Ng Choon Peng said: "Since our last funding announcement less than a year ago, we have made significant strides in our collaborations with organisations such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Johns Hopkins, with whom we published multiple Covid-19 studies, one of which was recently spotlighted by the National Institutes of Health."

That study showed that the T cells of patients who were infected with the original Covid-19 virus were able to fully recognise the B117 strain first detected in Britain, the P1 variant first detected in Brazil, and the B1351 variant first detected in South Africa.

The researchers analysed blood from 30 people who had recovered from Covid-19 before the emergence of the new, more contagious variants.

From those samples, they identified T cells active against multiple protein fragments from the virus, and looked at how these T cells fared against the three variants.

A total of 45 different mutations on different proteins, including the spike protein, of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19, have been identified in the three variants by researchers worldwide.

The team from ImmunoScape and NIAID found that virtually all the protein fragments that were recognised by the T cells were unaffected by the mutations. This would suggest that T cell protection against the variants may remain intact.