British Adendra Therapeutics closes $53m financing

Cancer and autoimmune disease specialist Adendra Therapeutics Ltd. has dived deep into the regulation of adaptive immune responses by dendritic cells. Now, the company has cashed in a $53m (£40m) Series A investment from ATP.  Adendra will use proceeds from the financing to generate small molecule and biological leads against solid cancers and T cell-based autoimmune disorders.

Adendra’s proprietary technology is based on the work of Professor Caetano Reis e Sousa’s laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in collaboration with Raj Mehta, Ph.D., an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at ATP who has previously founded and led GammaDelta Therapeutics. Adendra aims to design and develop novel immunotherapies focused on modulation of dendritic and other immune cells to augment immunological control of cancer or curtail T cell-driven autoimmunity.

Dendritic cells pick up fragments of the necrotic cancer or infected cell and display them to T cells. The alerted T cells start an attack that is sustained by continued goading by dendritic cells. This helps eliminate the tumour or the infection but can become dysregulated in autoimmunity, when the dendritic cell signals to attack are not switched off.