Link Cell Therapies Emerges From Stealth With $60 Million
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO — 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.
Link’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 “clean” target pairs.
“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,” said Co-Founder Robbie Majzner, MD of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. “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.”
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.
“It has been a pleasure to support Link Cell Therapies since its founding,” said Abraham Bassan, Member of the Link Board of Directors and Partner at Samsara BioCapital. “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’s achievements and the progress on Link’s lead program and pipeline.”
Link’s lead program, LNK001 for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma (“RCC”), 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.
Link’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.
