News

JIC Venture Growth Investments (VGI) has invested in Shinobi Therapeutics, Inc. (Shinobi Therapeutics) through its JIC Venture Growth Fund 2 (VGF2).

Shinobi Therapeutics (Shinobi, San Francisco, CA, Daniel Kemp, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer) is a biotechnology company developing a new class of off-the-shelf immune evasive iPSC-derived cell therapies. The company was established in 2023 through the merger of Thyas Ltd in Kyoto, Japan, which had been focused on iPSC research and development with Shin Kaneko M.D., Ph.D as a scientific founder, and Evade Bio in South San Francisco, known for its breakthrough immune evasion technology developed by Tobias Deuse, M.D.Shinobi has created a new allogeneic iPS-T cell platform that demonstrates complete immune evasion from all arms of the immune system.

Cell therapies have shown remarkable promise in treating blood cancers and other intractable diseases, but manufacturing costs render these therapies inaccessible to the majority of patients around the world. Off-the-shelf cell therapies offer a more scalable manufacturing approach, but face the additional challenge of allo-rejection, as patients’immune systems reject donor-derived and engineered cells as foreign invaders. To overcome this immune response, patients today receive immunosuppressive drugs before treatment, which can often result in unwanted side effects and serious. complications. Shinobi is taking a different approach by creating therapies that work with, not against, the patient’s immune system.

The significance of this investment is that Shinobi will delivers an allogeneic platform that effectively protects cell therapies from T cells, innate immune cells, as well as antibody-mediated immune rejection to make cell therapies accessible to patients on a global scale. Furthermore, Shinobi is planning to leverage this platform in oncology area as well as important areas of regenerative medicine and autoimmune disease.

Through this investment, we will leverage the bases, talent, and capital markets in both Japan and the United States to accelerate the clinical development of immune evasive iPSC-derived cell therapies. Furthermore, by generating global success stories for drug discovery ventures utilizing Japanese technology, we aim to contribute to the revitalization of the venture ecosystem in the Japanese life sciences sector.

^{The information contained in this notice is current at the time of publication and subject to change without notice.}

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