IMU Biosciences secures US$53m to decode the immune system
London-based IMU Biosciences has expanded its Series A financing to more than US$53m (£40m/€46m) in an oversubscribed round, as the company looks to scale its immune-profiling platform and move further into clinical applications.
The round was co-led by IQ Capital and Molten Ventures, with participation from the British Business Bank, Meltwind and existing investors. IMU said the new capital will support operational expansion, further development of its clinical platform and infrastructure, and the advancement of clinical programmes in stem cell transplantation, solid organ transplantation and immuno-oncology.
Founded on research from the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London, IMU Biosciences is building what it describes as a high-resolution map of the human immune system. The company says its platform can generate more than 100 million immune data points from a 2ml blood sample and resolve around 2,500 immune cell subsets in real time. Its aim is to turn immune profiling into a clinical tool for predicting treatment response, monitoring disease progression and identifying immune mechanisms that could guide precision medicine.
The company says its dataset is ” the world’s largest immune dataset”, with samples from more than 25,000 individuals. By combining multi-omic analysis with machine-learning analytics, IMU wants to establish what it calls a universal standard for immune profiling.
From data to clinical applications
The first clinical areas reflect where immune status can be particularly decisive. In haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, IMU is developing predictive tools for graft efficacy. In solid organ transplantation, the company is working on tools to predict graft rejection. In immuno-oncology, it is looking for immune signatures that could predict response and adverse events to checkpoint inhibitors.
The financing also supports IMU’s involvement in MANIFEST, a UK research consortium investigating why patients respond differently to cancer immunotherapies. The project, led by the Francis Crick Institute, is studying tumour and blood samples from 3,000 cancer patients to identify biomarkers linked to treatment response, relapse and disease detection.
IMU Chief Executive John Baker said the fundraise would allow the company to expand operations and continue deploying its technology across clinical programmes. Molten Ventures, which first backed the company in 2024 through a £11.5M round, said the combination of deep immune profiling and AI could help match patients to the right treatment at the right time.
While immune profiling has long been central to research, its translation into routine clinical decision-making remains technically demanding. IMU’s bet is that scale, standardisation and computational analysis can move the field beyond fragmented snapshots of immune activity towards a more actionable picture of immune health and disease.
