Autoimmune disease therapy firm Cabaletta Bio has raised $50m in a series B funding round. The extra capital, which follows a $38m series A, will be put to use funding the manufacture of the Pennsylvania-based company's chimeric autoantibody receptor T cell (CAAR-T) therapies. This system borrows the techniques used in chimeric antigen receptor T-cell methods for cancer treatments, and instead applies them to autoimmune diseases. CAAR-T's ability to target multiple antibodies at once, as well as its ability to produce large quantities of antibodies, is an important step towards treating patients with auto-immune-related diseases, such as
Autoimmune disease therapy firm Cabaletta Bio has raised $50m in a series B funding round. The extra capital, which follows a $38m series A, will be put to use funding the manufacture of the Pennsylvania-based company's chimeric autoantibody receptor T cell (CAAR-T) therapies. This system borrows the techniques used in chimeric antigen receptor T-cell methods for cancer treatments, and instead applies them to autoimmune diseases. The CAAR-T selectively rids mucosal pemphigus vulgaris patients of DSG3 protein-expressing B cells by using the 4-1BB costimulatory domain to boost cytokine production and a CD3-zeta signalling domain to control signalling during T-cell activation.