South San Francisco, Calif. and Austin, Texas — Link Cell Therapies has begun clinical dosing of its lead logic-gated CAR-T therapy, LNK001, while expanding its executive leadership team and increasing its Series A financing from $60 million to $90 million.
LNK001 is being evaluated in a Phase 1 trial in patients with advanced or metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma at MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The investigational therapy is designed to require co-expression of two antigens, CAIX and ENPP3, which are highly expressed in many renal cell carcinoma tumors. Link said the dual-target approach is intended to preserve the antitumor activity associated with CAIX targeting while reducing damage to healthy tissue where CAIX may also be expressed.
LNK001 is being manufactured at CTMC, a joint venture between Resilience and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Link also announced the appointment of Jie D’Elia as Chief Executive Officer and a member of its Board of Directors. D’Elia previously served as CEO of SystImmune and spent 11 years at Bristol Myers Squibb, most recently as Senior Vice President of Business Development for Oncology, Hematology and Cell Therapy.
Friedrich Graf Finckenstein has joined the company as Chief Medical Officer. He previously served as Chief Medical Officer of Iovance Biotherapeutics, where he worked on the company’s tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy portfolio and contributed to the approval of AMTAGVI.
Link co-founder Brian Slingerland has become Executive Chair. Slingerland previously co-founded and served as CEO of Stemcentrx, which AbbVie acquired in 2016 for $6.2 billion.
“From the beginning, our vision has been to translate this breakthrough science into therapies that can make a profound difference for people impacted by cancer,” said Link Cell Therapies co-founder Robbie Majzner, M.D., of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. “Bringing in leaders with the experience, commitment and passion to advance our technology and execute at scale gives me tremendous confidence that we can realize that vision.”
The company also expanded its Series A financing by $30 million to $90 million. The round was led by Johnson & Johnson through Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, with participation from Samsara BioCapital, Sheatree Capital, Wing Venture Capital, Bristol Myers Squibb, Kyowa Kirin, Sherpa Healthcare Partners, Western Technology Investment and the MD Anderson Cancer Focus Fund.
Link said the additional funding will support clinical and preclinical development of additional logic-gated CAR-T programs.
The company plans to advance a second solid tumor program in colorectal cancer, with a first-in-human trial expected to begin in 2027. Link said the program will use a new target pair that is co-expressed in most colorectal tumors but absent from normal healthy tissues.
Additional CAR-T programs targeting solid and hematologic cancers are also in earlier stages of development.
“Link’s logic-gate platform can make CAR-T broadly viable in solid tumors,” D’Elia said. “A targeting approach that reliably distinguishes tumor from healthy tissue is what allows CAR-T to pursue in solid tumors the kind of deep and durable responses it has achieved in hematologic cancers. This financing lets us advance a pipeline built on that approach across additional tumor types.”
