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Houston is once again well-represented on the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas’ latest grant awards, with both companies and individual researchers securing nearly $50.7 million in funding combined.
The Bayou City is home to most of the recipients from CPRIT’s $63 million slate, which will bring an Israel-based company's headquarters to Houston and high-profile researchers to local schools. The biggest awards for Houston-based companies fell under the product development research category:
- March Biosciences: $13.36 million — Co-founded by Sarah Hein, Dr. Max Mamonkin and Dr. Malcolm Brenner, March uses technology invented in Baylor College of Medicine’s Cell and Gene Therapy Center to address hard-to-treat leukemia and lymphoma.
- Mongoose Bio LLC: $10.62 million — Mongoose, which develops T-cell therapies for solid tumors, was founded by previous CPRIT Scholar winner Dr. Cassian Yee, a researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
- Stingray Therapeutics Inc.: $13.88 million — Founded by Jon Northrup, a former Eli Lilly & Co. executive, Stingray is developing a therapy to activate immune system responses to cancers. The company will use the CPRIT funding for a two-phase clinical trial of its product SR-8541A.
- FixNip Ltd.: $4.84 million — Israel-based FixNip, which is developing a natural nipple reconstruction implant for breast cancer survivors, is moving its headquarters to Houston as part of the CPRIT grant.
Additionally, CPRIT approved nearly $8 million to bring two cancer researchers to Houston as part of its CPRIT Scholar Awards program. Rice University received $1.99 million to bring Dr. Christina Tringides from Eidgenössische Technische Hochshule Zürich, a public research university in Switzerland, where she will work on an electrode array that can be used to treat brain cancers.
Meanwhile, Baylor College of Medicine received $6 million to bring Dr. Leonido Luznik to Houston. Luznik is listed as the head of the Luznik Lab at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, where he researches the immunobiology of graft treatments, according to Johns Hopkins’ website.
CPRIT was created by the Texas Legislature in 2007 and has awarded over $3 billion in grants to date. Grants have been used to bring companies such as Aravive Biologics and Salarius Pharmaceuticals to Houston. In 2019, legislators voted to award another $3 billion in funding to CPRIT.
Another funding milestone for March Biosciences
March Biosciences’ funding award follows the company receiving $4.5 million from the Cancer Focus Fund earlier this month. The company also struck a deal with MD Anderson's CTMC joint venture to manufacture its product line MB-105, which is currently undergoing a phase 1 clinical trial and is scheduled to enter phase 2 next year.
March was also one of the first Houston companies to join the portfolio of Chicago-based Portal Innovations, which expanded to the Texas Medical Center Helix Park campus this year.
After earning her Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, Hein worked at several local biotechnology companies, including Courier Therapeutics, which was sold to Boston-based Valo Health LLC in 2021. She also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence for one of the earliest cohorts of the TMC Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics before co-founding March in 2021.
“Houston’s been a tremendous place to build and find interesting technologies and figure how to put pieces together to build companies,” Hein said in an interview with Houston Inno. “Historically, even Houston-based companies did not have their leadership here because it was viewed as a limitation that couldn’t be overcome. But thanks to the pieces we as an ecosystem are putting together, I think [March Biosciences] is the first of many to come.”
