Tessa: Singapore cancer cell therapy startup Tessa Therapeutics to shut down

Tessa Therapeutics, a Singapore-based cancer cell therapy startup backed by the likes of Temasek and Polaris Partners, will shut down, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to Endpoints News. Local media reports had emerged in recent days saying the biotech had failed to raise additional funds. Malcolm Brenner The biotech has been working to bring cell therapies to patients with various forms of cancer for years, based on work out of Baylor College of Medicine professor Malcolm Brenner and with help from the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. A $126 million raise last year - following more than $200 million raised prior to that point - was expected to last the biotech no more than two years, then-interim CEO John Ng had told Endpoints at the time. The money would bankroll a pivotal lymphoma clinical trial, providing the backbone for key data next year that would pave the way for a BLA filing thereafter, Ng had said. But the chilled biotech financing environment, extending beyond the US and into the industry's global connections, inserted a fork in Tessa's road, and the board opted to call it quits after failing to secure more funding or notch a buyout, regional news outlet The Business Times reported on June 30. The outlet cited a letter to shareholders, in which the company said its board decided to cease operations. With deep ties to Bay­lor and fresh sup­port from Po­laris, Sin­ga­pore's Tes­sa rais­es $126M for piv­otal CAR study Tessa couldn't immediately be reached for comment as of publication time. This story will be updated accordingly. In recent months, the company had signed a contract with the US' National Cancer Institute, given a lab tour to Singapore Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean, presented clinical data on both its off-the-shelf and autologous blood cancer cell therapy candidates, and moved into a new office. Thomas Willemsen After some CEO switches over the years, Tessa poached a Takeda executive last fall to steer the ship. Thomas Willemsen joined as CEO and president last October after serving as Asia-Pacific SVP for Takeda. Tessa was working on autologous and allogeneic CD30-directed CAR-T cell therapies for Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphomas. It was also working on a HER2+ CAR-T. All three trials for the autologous CD30 CAR-T are listed as active but no longer recruiting patients, while the allogeneic and HER2+ CAR-T trials - investigator-sponsored studies funded by Tessa - are still shown as recruiting on clinicaltrials.gov, as of March. Brenner, the scientific co-founder, and his Baylor lab have previously contributed to other CAR-T work in the industry, spurring collaborations with Celgene and bluebird bio, and recently helping launch Houston-based CAR-T startup March Biosciences. The company follows multiple other biotechs in shelving their clinical trials, halting development and laying off workers in light of market woes. Cell and gene therapies, which can require complex and expensive manufacturing, have been hit particularly hard by the life sciences funding doldrums. In addition to Polaris and Temasek, a massive sovereign wealth fund in Singapore, Tessa has also received funds from EDBI, Heliconia Capital and Heritas Capital, among others. The company employed about 180 people as of February, according to data from PitchBook.