<p><strong><span class="legendSpanClass">SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO </span></strong>&#8212; Link Cell Therapies, an oncology cell therapy company, announced its official launch from stealth with a $60 million Series A financing that was led by Johnson &; Johnson, through its corporate venture capital organization, Johnson &; Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc. , with participation from founding investors Samsara BioCapital and Sheatree Capital, as well as Wing Venture Capital and other new strategic and financial investors.</p>
<p>Link&#8217;s proprietary logic-gating technologies allow for safe targeting of multiple antigens that are co-expressed on cancer cells but do not overlap or only minimally overlap in their normal healthy tissue expression. This platform enables the creation of next-generation CAR-T therapeutics for solid and liquid cancers built upon an entirely new landscape of &#8220;clean&#8221; target pairs.</p>
<p>&#8220;We recognized that for most cancer types, particularly solid tumors, the promise of CAR-T therapies is limited by a dearth of cancer-specific targets and abundant expression of most solid tumor targets in normal vital tissue,&#8221; said Co-Founder Robbie Majzner, MD of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. &#8220;Link is advancing a technology that we developed while at Stanford University that allows for logic-gated CAR-T cell control. The Link-based CAR activates and kills target cells only when a combination of antigens is co-localized on the tumor, thereby bypassing normal tissues that express only one of those targets. We believe this approach will enable potent CAR-T therapies to attack a wide range of tumors while sparing healthy tissue.&#8221;<b></b></p>
<p>The Series A financing, which follows a 2022 Seed Round led by Samsara and Sheatree, adds a number of strong financial and strategic investors to the syndicate, including JJDC, Inc, Bristol Myers Squibb, Kyowa Kirin, Wing Venture Capital, and Sherpa Healthcare Partners.</p>
<p>&#8220;It has been a pleasure to support Link Cell Therapies since its founding,&#8221; said Abraham Bassan, Member of the Link Board of Directors and Partner at Samsara BioCapital. &#8220;The team at Link has advanced a unique technology that could enable the development of multiple, impactful treatments for patients with cancer. I have been impressed with the team&#8217;s achievements and the progress on Link&#8217;s lead program and pipeline.&#8221;<b></b></p>
<p>Link&#8217;s lead program, LNK001 for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma (&#8220;RCC&#8221;), is on track for an Investigational New Drug (IND) application and initiation of dosing in a Phase I clinical trial in 2026. LNK001 targets two antigens that are uniquely and highly co-expressed in most RCC tumors. LNK001 is designed to enable tumor-specific efficacy while avoiding on-target, off-tumor toxicity that has limited prior experimental therapies targeting each individual antigen.</p>
<p>Link&#8217;s second program being developed for colorectal cancer will target Development Candidate selection in 2026 and initiation of human clinical studies in 2027. The company has multiple additional CAR-T programs in earlier development in solid and liquid cancers that will be developed internally or through partnerships.</p>

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