We use the highest possible quality starting material: young, healthy, and disease-free umbilical cord blood stem cells. This enhances therapeutic efficacy and enables intentional leveraging of nature’s innate diversity through accessing the hundreds of thousands of umbilical cord blood units currently frozen in public banks.
Our ML-powered screening system enables affordable and efficient sampling of donors, engineering constructs, manufacturing processes, and cell types to identify or design optimal clinical candidates for almost any disease.
Our proprietary stem cell expansion technology enables consistent, affordable, and truly scalable manufacturing of HSCs, NK cells, T cells, red blood cells, neutrophils, mitochondria, and more – bridging discovery and translation to make cell therapies safe, accessible, and effective for the patients who desperately need them.
Building the next generation of cell therapies
ImmuneBridge is building a world where high quality cell therapies can be rapidly designed and easily manufactured at commercial scale and ultralow cost.
The Problem
Cell therapies face key challenges that limit their efficacy and accessibility:
High Cost
Source Variability
Poor Manufacturability
Suboptimal Safety Profiles
Long Development Timelines
Despite these significant hurdles, companies and developers often choose to work independently – and therefore inefficiently – rather than build on the advances of others.
They design new therapies as quickly as possible, without taking the time to properly build screening and scalable manufacturing processes alongside them.
Then they race these suboptimal or variable cell products into the clinic, competing for limited patients and funding. As a result, progress remains frustratingly slow and billions of dollars have been wasted. Even more devastating is the fact that countless patients have been treated with therapies that are ineffective at best or dangerous at worst.
Our Solution
We aim to change this paradigm by bridging technologies together to make a real difference for patients in need.
We started by building a powerful platform that integrates source screening and scalable manufacturing, thereby addressing several of the universal challenges faced by developers.
Next, we validated that our processes are compatible with all major engineering modalities and can produce cells across diverse immune lineages at high purity, quality, and quantity.
We are now allowing partners across academia and industry to leverage this groundbreaking platform and build a new generation of inherently efficacious and scalable cell therapies – ensuring worldwide access to cures for diseases previously considered untreatable.
Our Team
Led by Drs Nina Horowitz and Rui Tostoes, ImmuneBridge employs a team of experienced R&D and PD scientists and operations staff.
Nina Horowitz is a bioengineer with research experience in disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to cancer immunology. She worked in laboratories at Williams College, Mount Sinai, Boston University, and Stanford University before joining the ImmuneBridge team. Her doctoral research centered around the uses of engineered natural killer cells for solid tumor immunotherapy. BA: Williams College. MS, PhD: Stanford University.
Rui Tostoes is an accomplished scientist and creative leader, with a passion for product and people development in cell therapy and bioprocessing. Through his work in MilliporeSigma and FloDesign Sonics, he is experienced in matrix work with functional areas of R&D, Product Development and Commercial in delivering successful product development and customer program execution. PhD: MIT, Portugal.
James Liu earned his BS in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MS in Immunology from the University of Southern California. James initially joined ImmuneBridge to help optimize NK cell differentiation from hematopoietic stem cells. He then continued his work in immuno-oncology at Revolution Medicines, where he investigated the effects of RAS inhibitors on the tumor microenvironment. James is excited to return to ImmuneBridge and continue advancing innovative therapies. MS: University of Southern California.
Miguel Madero is a seasoned entrepreneur and technologist with 25 years of experience building and leading teams and companies. He worked as a consultant driving process improvements and tech adoption at large enterprises, started several companies in the healthcare industry, and worked at startups in key leadership roles. Most recently, he founded Foxtrot Health where they helped people with Alzheimer's better manage the disease.
Albina Popova has more than a decade of administrative experience in the global healthcare field. She is adept at facilitating teamwork and implementing results-driven programs to impact patients and clinicians. Albina is passionate about advancing medicine and expanding access to healthcare for all. BA: University of California, Berkeley.
Maha Qubain specializes in cell therapy process development and manufacturing. She began her career at Kite working on CAR-T manufacturing and optimization, then moved to MiNK Therapeutics to support CAR-iNKT development, and later contributed to allogeneic iNKT & γδ T-cell platform development at Appia Bio. BS: University of California, Los Angeles — Microbiology, Immunology & Molecular Genetics
Alicia Romero, CPT II, has more than nine years of experience supporting nearly every aspect of ImmuneBridge’s scientific and business operations. She has an extensive background in payroll, benefits, AR/AP, procurement, business compliance, and vendor management, and is essential in supporting the team's execution and organization. Alicia also oversees scientific logistics, from international shipments to lab operations. She enjoys building systems and fostering a supportive environment that enables the team to thrive.
Ece Canan Sayitoglu is a bioengineer with extensive research experience in fields including immunology, molecular biology, genetic engineering and cancer immunotherapy. She completed her MSc degree at King's College London and PhD at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. She worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at Nova Southeastern University (FL) and more recently at Stanford University (CA) before joining the ImmuneBridge team. Her doctoral research focused on enhancing lentiviral gene delivery in human NK cells for better targeted therapies, and her postdoctoral studies helped advance genetically modified NK cells and T cells for various cancer immunotherapies. She is passionate about creating off-the-shelf cell therapies for cancer patients. BSc: Sabanci University. MSc: King's College London. PhD: Sabanci University.
Board of Directors
Tom Farrell has a twenty-five year track record as a serial biotech company builder and executive. He has been the founding CEO of two public cell therapy companies, most recently Artiva Biotherapeutics, a leader in off-the-shelf primary NK cell therapies for autoimmune disease and cancer, where he raised a $78 million Series A and supported the company through a successful crossover financing, major strategic partnership with Merck, and journey to a first S-1 filing. Previously, Tom was President and CEO of Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, a pioneer in the development of controllable cell therapies. At Bellicum, which he built from a virtual startup through a highly successful IPO in 2014, raising a total of more than $300 million in the process, Tom brought five genetically modified cell therapies into clinical development, including one into pivotal trials. Previously, he was the founding President and CEO of Cylene Pharmaceuticals, a small molecule rational drug design company targeting secondary DNA structures to regulate oncogene expression. Tom received his B.A. in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller scholar.
Biotech Executive
Omri Amirav-Drory is the General Partner at NFX Bio and a seasoned scientist-operator turned investor. He was the Founding CEO of Genome Compiler, which was acquired by Twist Bioscience, where he later served as Head of Corporate Development. Omri went on to found Tech.Bio, investing in and advising leading techbio companies like Mammoth Biosciences and Immunai. Now at NFX, he champions Scientist-CEOs and envisions a future where they are the standard.
Investor, NFX
Oliver Hardick is an Engineer by training (Eng Doctorate UCL 2012), Entrepreneur by mindset (Puridify, sold to GE 2017), & Investor by trade (M Ventures). In 2013 Ollie founded Puridify, a biotech tools company, based on his academic research. He led this company as CEO through VC funding to a strong exit by GE Healthcare in 2017, interacting with biotherapeutic manufacturers globally throughout this journey. Ollie spent the subsequent 5 years at GE & Danaher Corp in leadership roles supporting innovation, developing business strategy, and M&A. He understands the needs of both and can provide key insights to spin-outs & start-ups from inception to exit. Ollie has an honorary lectureship at UCL and served two elected terms as board member of BioIndustry Association (BIA), an influential trade association promoting the ecosystem for innovative life sciences in the UK.
Investor, M Ventures
Alex Jacobson is a founder and investment partner of 137 Ventures. Alex is also a founding investor of ImmuneBridge, a biotech startup developing genetically enhanced immune cell therapies, and founding advisor to Armada, a startup building a distributed data center platform connected by Starlink. Alex is also on the board of advisors of Strategy Capital, the investment fund of Hamilton Helmer, author of Seven Powers. Previously, Alex was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Founders Fund, where he led the diligence processes for investments in SpaceX. He also founded Shop.com, a shopping and comparison website, which he eventually sold to Altura Ventures, Virtual Office, one of the first companies to register commercially valuable domain names, and Interband, an advertising management and measurement company, which sold to Winstar Communications. BS: Cognitive Science, Brown University
Founder, 137 Ventures
Dylan Morris is a Managing Director at Insight Partners, where he leads the firm’s bio practice. Dylan joined Insight in 2021 to focus on investments at the intersection of computation and biology. He loves technology-enabled approaches to drug discovery and development, new therapeutic modalities, and curative therapies. He is drawn towards novel methods of generating data and enjoys working with driven founders who agree that the primary goal is to help patients. AB: Computer Science, Harvard
Investor, Insight Partners
Scientific Advisory Board
Catherine Blish is a Professor of Medicine and Immunology and Associate Dean for Basic and Translational Science at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she conducts deep profiling of NK repertoires. She has expertise in phenotypes and diversity of NK cells in clinical settings, individuals, and populations and currently serves on several Scientific Advisory Boards. MD/PhD: University of Washington School of Medicine
Jesse Cotari is an immunologist whose early work at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center focused on computational models of immune-cell behavior. As the scientific founder of ImmuneBridge, he led development of the company’s HSC expansion and differentiation platform. He is now the founder and CEO of Ampliment, a company using multimodal AI to modernize laboratory work.
Adam Wilkinson is a group leader at MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and a previous NIH-funded instructor at Stanford. He has expertise in ex vivo HSC expansion and mechanisms of HSC stemness and has researched stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine at Stanford and Oxford. PhD: Haematology, University of Cambridge
Investors
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