April 26 Quick Takes: CD24 will be new focus of Forty Seven founders as Stanford spinout Pheast debuts
Plus Nkarta follows breakthrough data with $200M raise, and updates from Epitopea, Forcefield and ViGeneron
Forty Seven Inc. co-founders Irving Weissman and Ravi Majeti unveiled their latest venture, Pheast Therapeutics Inc., Tuesday, with the new checkpoint play raising $76 million in a series A round led by Catalio Capital Management and Arch Venture Partners. Weissman and Majeti, who played a critical role in discovering CD47 and developing therapies against the target, will lead the Stanford University spinout with Amira Barkal and Roy Maute. Barkal, who will be interim CEO, and Weissman discovered the role of CD24 as a “don’t eat me” signal; the target will be the focus of the newco’s pipeline. Gilead Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) acquired Forty Seven in a $4.9 billion takeout in March 2020. Alexandria Venture Investments and Risk and Reward also invested in Pheast’s series A.
Weissman’s team showed in a Nature study published in 2019 that CD24 on cancer cells engages SIGLEC10 on tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) to block tumor phagocytosis. Forty Seven told BioCentury at the time that it believed the study could point to combination strategies for blocking don’t eat me signals on tumors, but thought that inhibitors of the CD24-SIGLEC10 interaction described in the paper would target a narrower set of phagocytes than CD47 pathway inhibitors...