Waypoint Bio

Today we announced the close of a $14.5 million seed financing, led by Hummingbird Ventures, to turbocharge #drugdiscovery using in vivo spatial pooled screening technology. We will use our platform to initially design cell therapies for solid tumors and later, Treg therapies for autoimmune diseases. The FDA recently approved the first ever cell therapy for solid tumors, yet innovation in this area has been slow given the challenges of the solid tumor microenvironment and difficulty testing therapies in relevant model systems at-scale. Our platform – which uniquely combines #spatialbiology with pooled screening for the purpose of drug discovery – can conduct initial screens of cell therapy designs *in vivo* and simultaneously measure hundreds of phenotypes at the single cell level, helping illuminate which designs work and why. This novel approach enables the simultaneous measurement of how many cell therapy candidates can navigate multiple aspects of the solid tumor microenvironment, helping guide the engineering of cell therapy designs for the treatment of historically intractable diseases, such as pancreatic cancer. Thanks to the several other institutional investors who contributed to our financing and support our vision, including Recode Ventures, Fifty Years, Village Global, MBX Capital, and Boom Capital. To learn more read today’s press release: https://lnkd.in/gbKR9jBZ

Excited to share that Waypoint Bio has emerged from stealth to turbocharge drug discovery using *in vivo* spatial pooled screening tech with $14.5 million in financing, led by Hummingbird Ventures, with participation from other investors, including Recode Ventures and pre-seed lead Fifty Years. Pooled screening is an incredibly powerful technology for drug discovery, but it’s historically been limited to measuring simple cell phenotypes, such as growth or drug resistance. This limits the technology’s value in more complex diseases where interactions between cells and their environment are key, including T cell interactions with solid tumor cancers, such as pancreatic and gastric cancer. Our platform turbocharges traditional pooled screening by leveraging #spatialbiology to generate complex, multivariate and spatial readouts for every perturbation, and quickly generate novel drug candidates with a greater probability of clinical success. We will use the financing toward first designing CAR T-cell therapies with superior efficacy against the tumor microenvironment, and later, Treg therapies for autoimmune diseases, and advance them in partnership with biotech and pharma and on our own. Thanks to Ryan Cross for speaking with me and David Phizicky for Endpoints News about our platform, the first to combine pooled screening and spatial biology for drug discovery, and to our awesome investors for supporting our work to bring new therapies to the underserved! https://lnkd.in/eV_hc3Y9