One year ago, geneticist Stephen Elledge was hard at work trying to figure out how to use his genetic sequencing platform to target SARS-CoV-2. A decorated professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Elledge's strategy was to take high-throughput genetic approaches to target specific antibodies.
As the coronavirus pandemic gripped the U.S., Elledge, working with Tomasz Kula of Harvard and Brigham and Women's and H. Benjamin Larman of Johns Hopkins University, alongside a slew of other researchers, spent the spring modifying a machine-learning model so it could accurately classify Covid-19 patients and detect related antibodies. Their results, the scientists wrote in November when the research was published in Science, could proved "a stepping stone" to use those antibodies in the treatment of Covid-19.
Meanwhile, Boston-based life sciences venture capital firm the Longwood Fund was playing a longer game. Principal Lea Hachigian and her team wanted to get the technology out of the lab and into hospitals — and develop it for uses beyond the coronavirus.
"When we saw [Elledge] take the system, modify it quickly to look at Covid and then get this amazing wealth of data within a couple of months, we were sold, at that point, that hey, this is a really powerful tool and can be directed immediately toward other diseases," Hachigian said. "If it can do this with SARS-CoV-2, think of the other diseases."
Hachigian and her team launched ImmuneID in 2020 using Elledge's technology. (The two had worked together previously on the launch of TScan Therapeutics, a Waltham-based cancer drug developer that raised a $100 million Series C round just last month.) Hachigian now heads up the startup as CEO, and on Wednesday, the company officially emerged from stealth with $17 million in seed funding.
The round was led by the Longwood Fund, with participation from Arch Venture Partners, Pitango HealthTech, In-Q-Tel, Xfund and others. The team of five will expand to a team of 15 by the end of the year with the new funding; ImmuneID will also use the money to explore what kinds of diseases Elledge's platform can be used to treat.
To start, ImmuneID plans to address severe allergy, autoimmunity, oncology and infectious disease. Hachigian is especially excited about the prospects for severe allergy treatment, pointing to preclinical studies that show "really interesting" results.
"There are some really key antibodies in severe allergy that we could basically block that are causing the anaphylaxis immune response," she said. "There's really nice early data on that, really nice preclinical data, that this approach could work."
ImmuneID is among the dozen or so companies slated to benefit from the Longwood Fund's fifth fund, which closed at $170 million in July 2020. The firm set out to raise the fund as a result of the Covid-19-driven biopharma boom.
