Starna Therapeutics secures over ￥300M in Series B funding to advance in vivo CAR-T pipeline
Starna Therapeutics recently announced the completion of its Series B financing round, raising over 300 million RMB. This round was co-led by LYFE Capital, Hillhouse Ventures, and Lilly Asia Ventures, with continued investment from existing shareholders Source Code Capital, Sherpa Healthcare Partners, and Primavera Capital.
The proceeds will be primarily used to upgrade and expand the company's extrahepatic targeted delivery platform, accelerate the clinical development of its in vivo CAR-T pipeline, and further solidify the company's innovative positioning in the field of RNA therapeutics.
Starna Therapeutics is a clinical-stage company focused on RNA drug development, dedicated to creating innovative RNA-based medicines for patients worldwide through its self-developed extrahepatic delivery technology.
Established in August 2021, Starna Therapeutics concentrates on extrahepatic targeted delivery technology and is committed to developing innovative drugs centered on mRNA. The company has built a 4,000-square-meter R&D and pilot production base, establishing a core industrial chain encompassing chemistry, mRNA, and LNP preparations to effectively overcome the key challenges in mRNA drug development. It has synthesized and screened a library of thousands of novel cationic lipid molecules and tens of thousands of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), achieving targeted delivery to multiple extrahepatic tissues and specific cell types in small animals and non-human primates.
The company has built a robust pipeline including mRNA preventive vaccines, therapeutic cancer vaccines, and in vivo cell therapies (in vivo CAR-T). Among these, the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine (STR-V003) has received FDA clinical trial approval, while the cancer vaccine (STR-V005) and in vivo CAR-T technology (STR-P004) have successively entered the clinical trial stage.