The Fire Awards: Clasp Therapeutics Inc.

Editor's note: Each year, DC Inno and the Washington Business Journal publish the Fire Awards spotlighting the founders, funders and fast-growing companies helping to power Greater Washington’s innovation economy. Click here to read our other profiles.

Rockville’s Clasp Therapeutics Inc. made a big splash earlier this year when it launched with $150 million from a pool of significant investors — and is hoping its cancer treatment has an even bigger impact.

The Johns Hopkins University spinout had secured the capital in March from New York’s Catalio Capital Management, Boston’s Third Rock Ventures, Denmark’s Novo Holdings and other health-focused backers. And it’s wasted no time getting to work.

The company stood up an 8,350-square-foot protein engineering and manufacturing hub in Montgomery County, important for access to the local talent pool, CEO Robert Ross said earlier this year. It’s already grown its headcount from 14 to 34 people, as it pushes its lead candidate into clinical trials. Clasp is running research and development out of a second office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The biotech is advancing a new type of T-cell engager, as it’s called, that activates a patient’s immune system to destroy cancer cells within the body, while preserving healthy cells. It’s designed to prevent complications caused by chemotherapies, for example, that put healthy tissue at risk — and could be tolerated at higher doses as a result. Clasp contends it would be the first such tumor-specific therapy to be tested in humans.

The company sees the candidate as a potential game changer for solid tumors difficult to treat with standard therapies, Ross said previously. It’s also built to be less expensive than other immune system-based therapies that require personalized care because its candidate can bind to any immune cell.

The idea comes from scientific founders and Johns Hopkins alumni, including Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a cancer geneticist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and Dr. Drew Pardoll, an immuno-oncology expert and university faculty member, who have found ways to help the immune system target cancer cells. Clasp intends to commercialize that work.

Clasp Therapeutics Inc.