With $144M Series B, Outpace Bio beats funding goal for solid tumor cell therapies

Seattle startup Outpace Bio, a Lyell Immunopharma spinout using AI to design proteins for solid tumor cell therapies, has raised a $144 million Series B to gather clinical data from its first two programs.

It’s the 60th megaround of the year for private biotech companies, but Outpace didn’t originally have plans for a nine-figure raise. Investors kept piling in, though, CEO Marc Lajoie said in an interview. RA Capital Management led the round, which was announced Thursday.

Bristol Myers Squibb, Artis Ventures and other existing backers from Outpace’s $30 million Series A from 2021 also joined the new funding. Qatar Investment Authority, Surveyor Capital, Sheatree Capital, Black Opal Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and others invested in Outpace for the first time.

The company is slated to enter the clinic next year with a mesothelin autologous CAR-T known as OPB-101, Lajoie said. In the past, Outpace looked at bringing in external clinical-stage assets, but the startup determined its own efforts were generating better-performing assets, Lajoie said. “We haven’t really found a path to bringing stuff in, to date, that has been disruptive to our timelines,” he said.

The lead autologous program will be investigated for advanced platinum-resistant epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancer. A TCR-T cell therapy, dubbed OPB-201, is expected to enter the clinic around 2026 for solid tumors. It’s also likely going to be an autologous program, Lajoie said. But the company doesn’t plan to box itself into autologous cell therapies. It can eventually move into allogeneic, in vivo and other cell therapy forms, he added.

Outpace will collect clinical data from the first two cell therapies using the Series B funds. While there are crossover investor names in this financing, the CEO noted Outpace doesn’t “have much to say about IPO plans right now.”

The company is a protein designer at its core and could work in other areas, including protein therapeutics or autoimmune diseases, but is for now focused on the potential for cell therapies in solid tumors. The class of medicines has had great success at treating blood cancers but hasn’t made much of a mark yet on the solid tumor side. Multiple biotechs are attempting to change that.

“Our founding thesis is that cell therapies have offered this tantalizing opportunity to shift how we think about efficacy in oncology, especially in CD19 and BCMA-expressing heme cancers,” the CEO said.

Outpace wants to bring those dramatic treatment effects into the “other 95% of cancers.”

“Proteins are the biological unit of function. It’s not just the CAR or the TCR that you’re using to target these T cells. [It’s] all of the signaling cascades, the cytokines that are being produced,” Lajoie said. “All of these things are protein-driven, and so if our technology has the ability to control the shape of proteins — proteins get their function from their shape — then we have the ability to program each aspect of the cell’s function.”

The 53-employee biotech works with an external CDMO to manufacture its cell therapies and will continue growing its clinical team, the CEO said. Outpace also has a partnership with its originator, Lyell Immunopharma, looking at tumor-restricted IL-12 with the goal of avoiding systemic exposure.
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Author information:
Kyle LaHucik
Senior Reporter
klahucik@endpointsnews.com
@ky_lahucik
Kyle LaHucik on LinkedIn

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