Cancer Focus Fund invests $4.8M into Houston-based March Biosciences

The Cancer Focus Fund LP invested $4.8 million into a cell therapy company that has already tapped some of Houston’s growing life sciences resources.

March Biosciences will use the funding to support the company’s trials of its main product line, MB-105, co-founder and CEO Sarah Hein told Houston Inno

MB-105 is a cell therapy described as a chimeric antigen receptor-T cell, or CAR-T, therapy intended to target leukemia and lymphoma associated with T-cells. CAR-T therapies enable T-cells to recognize and attack cancer cells through genetic modification, according to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

MB-105 originated at Baylor College of Medicine, which is also where clinical trials are being held. The phase 2 clinical trial is slated for the second or third quarter of 2024, depending on how quickly testing sites can be set up.

“These patients are incredibly sick and desperately need alternative therapeutics,” Hein said. “There really aren’t any good highly targeted therapeutics [available], much less these powerful immunotherapy options that can transform patient care for lymphoma and leukemia.”

Ross Barrett, a founder and managing partner at the Houston-based Cancer Focus Fund, said the fund had reached out to March around the summer of 2023 as part of its routine selection of life sciences companies nearing the clinical trial stage to invest in.

“We look globally,” Barrett said. “Sarah’s technology is in competition with the best of the best in Japan, Europe and Asia. Quite frankly, it’s a seminal moment in the Houston biotech and life sciences history.”

March Biosciences founder draws on local resources

Hein co-founded March in 2021, but it wasn’t her first crack at Houston’s life sciences industry. She previously worked as a venture fellow at Mercury Fund and as a director of research at Resonant Therapeutics before moving to Courier Therapeutics, which was acquired in 2021 by Boston-based Valo Health.

Hein then moved to the Texas Medical Center, where she was one of the founding entrepreneurs-in-residence for the Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics, supported by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Hein said resources from the TMC and its member institutions, such as MD Anderson, would make it easier for other Houston founders to grow their startups locally.

“Historically, even Houston-based companies have not always had their leadership in Houston because it was viewed as a limitation that couldn’t be overcome,” Hein said. “This story couldn’t have happened 10 years ago — not because the technology didn’t exist, but because pieces like the Cancer Focus Fund and TMC Venture Fund didn’t exist.”

March recently closed an agreement with CTMC, an MD Anderson-led joint venture that helps startups achieve commercialization. The company was also added to the portfolio of Chicago-based Portal Innovations, a venture fund focused on life sciences that recently opened lab and office space in the TMC’s Helix Park campus.

“March had the TMC Venture Fund seeding it, they had angel investors, they had the CTMC,” Barrett said. “It’s like a good gumbo — you’ve got to put a lot of different ingredients together.”

The Cancer Focus Fund's most recent local investment was a $4.5 million funding round for ImmunoGenesis, another company targeting cancers that resist traditional treatments. The fund launched in October 2020 with over $50 million in capital commitments.