Sean Ainsworth hopes to strike biotech gold, again, joining Seattle-based Immusoft Corp. as CEO and chairman. Immusoft is a gene-therapy company that hopes to use a patient’s immune cells to treat diseases, including MPS-I, or mucopolysaccharidosis type I, a rare genetic disease that is expected to be Immusoft’s first clinical application. The company uses a cell-culture system invented by Nobel laureate David Baltimore that it calls Immune System Programming.
Immusoft is looking to get its gene therapy technology into clinical trials, and the Seattle startup announced Friday that it has raised $3 million to kickstart that process. The funding is first part of the company’s ongoing Series B…. Veteran biotech executive Sean Ainsworth is joining the company as its new CEO, filling the shoes of the company’s Founder and longtime CEO Matthew Scholz. Scholz is transitioning to become the company’s CTO and will retain his position on the board of directors.
SEATTLE, Wash. (November 1, 2016)— Immusoft Corporation, a Seattle, Wash.-based gene therapy company, has closed on $2.74 million of a $3 million fundraising round. Founders Fund’s FF Science and Technium Partners led the investment. The round was oversubscribed and Immusoft says it expects to close on the remaining amount shortly.
Immusoft has closed $2.7 million in Series A3 funding. The Seattle-based gene therapy startup developed technology that uses a patient’s immune cells to cure disease. It will use the funding to prepare for a new drug trial with the Food and Drug Administration.“The capital raised in this round will give us the resources we need to submit our Investigational New Drug application,” founder and CEO Matthew Scholz said in a news release. “We are grateful to our investors and for the speed in which we were able to close our latest effort to raise capital.”
If the body is driven more by information than by chemistry, why not treat disease with information? This question led Matthew Scholz to biology, and, ultimately, to Immusoft Corporation, a Seattle company he founded in 2009. Immusoft technology programs B cells, part of the body’s immune system, to treat disease. … By tweaking the code that tells the cells what to produce, Immusoft can make them into tiny treatment factories that continue to operate inside the body. In March, Immusoft acquired Minneapolis-based Discovery Genomics, which has a process that makes it far easier and cheaper to program the cells.
