Appia Bio is developing off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapies for cancer patients. Autologous cell therapies are expensive and time-consuming to make as some patients lack sufficient high quality cells to engineer. Instead, Appia is taking healthy donor hematopoietic stem cells and repurposing them to create chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered invariant natural killer T cells (iNKT) - a form of allogeneic cell therapy. iNKT cells are a powerful subtype of T cells that have multiple tumor cell-killing mechanisms but are exceedingly rare. Appia is mass producing the iNKTs and engineering them with a CAR to boost their response. These CAR-iNKTs are off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapies that, once created, can be scaled on demand and deployed to cancer patients.

<p>Appia Bio is developing off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapies for cancer patients. Autologous cell therapies are expensive and time-consuming to make as some patients lack sufficient high quality cells to engineer. Instead, Appia is taking healthy donor hematopoietic stem cells and repurposing them to create chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered invariant natural killer T cells (iNKT) - a form of allogeneic cell therapy. iNKT cells are a powerful subtype of T cells that have multiple tumor cell-killing mechanisms but are exceedingly rare. Appia is mass producing the iNKTs and engineering them with a CAR to boost their response. These CAR-iNKTs are off-the-shelf allogeneic cell therapies that, once created, can be scaled on demand and deployed to cancer patients.</p>


Appia Bio

Founded: 2020
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Employee range: 11 - 50
Clinical stage: RD
Therapy area: AML
Drug types: ONC
Lead product: Undisclosed
Funding: $52M A May 2021

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