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Cambridge-based Garuda Therapeutics announced it closed a $62m series B funding round to support its off-the-shelf, self-renewing blood stem cell technology.

Garuda launched 15 months ago with $72m in funding, with the aim to use its cellular therapy to potentially cure over 70 diseases. Since then, it has identified a further 50 that could benefit from stem cell treatment.

Its therapy uses proprietary hematopoietic stem cells, which will be faster and more effective, and lead to greater patient accessibility.

Using a patient’s own depleted cells or seeking out a biological donor match is both costly and time-prohibitive.

The series B funding will be shared between two programmes: transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia (TDBT) in Europe, and bone marrow failure syndrome in Europe, South America and North America.

It’s also notable that having off-the-shelf gene therapies will help close the racial divide in treatments. According to a 2019 study, white Americans have a 77% chance of finding a donor on the National Marrow Donor Program’s ‘Be The Match’ registry, whereas Black patients have around a 23% chance.

Dhvanit Shah PhD, co-founder and CEO of Garuda stated: “Garuda is built upon the foundation of what we consider to be the most de-risked and highly validated blood stem cell-based cell therapy approach, and has the potential to overcome challenges to the current standard of care, including lack of consistency, scalability, durability, affordability and availability of suitable healthy donors. We are grateful for the continued strong financial support from our elite institutional investors that will help enable us to bring our off-the-shelf durable blood stem cell and immune cell programmes to patients in need. Garuda’s series B investment translates directly into the advancement of two lead programmes for haematology and oncology indications. This funding milestone is another crucial step to delivering life-changing cellular therapeutics to patients around the world afflicted by treatable, and often curable, diseases.”