Carma raises venture funding

Carma Therapeutics Inc. (Philadelphia, Pa.) said it raised an undisclosed amount in an "initial" round of financing co-led by AbbVie Ventures and HealthCap. Grazia Equity and IP Group plc (LSE:IPO) also participated. The company, which is developing chimeric antigen receptor macrophages (CARMAs), declined to discuss financial terms.

Spun out of the lab of Saar Gill at the University of Pennsylvania, Carma is developing the chimeric adenoviral vector Ad5/F35 to express CAR constructs with antigen-specific extracellular domains and CD3zeta intracellular domains. The vector also induces CARMAs to adopt the immune-stimulating M1 phenotype, making them resistant to adopting the tumor-promoting M2 phenotype (see BioCentury Innovations, May 18)...