Smart Immune is a clinical-stage biotechnology startup headquartered in France, developing a thymus-empowered T-cell therapy platform called ProTcell Platform. The company’s mission is to fight cancer and infection by fully and rapidly re-arming the immune system.
The ProTcell Platform is a pioneered, allogenic, thymus-empowered T-cell therapy platform. ProTcell reinvigorates the thymus by introducing healthy allogeneic T-cell progenitors into the patient. Through ex-vivo technology, Smart Immune can provide large numbers of T-cell progenitors from hematopoietic stem cells in only seven days. Under normal circumstances, this would take one year in the body. Once infused into the patient, the thymus then educates the T-cell progenitors to become fully functioning T-cells in under three months compared to 15-18 months. The time reduction to full immune recovery is significant and can provide a shift in the benefit-to-risk ratio of allogenic T-cell medicine. The ProTcell Platform also mitigates some of the challenges seen with allogeneic T-cell therapy. With the T-cell progenitors infused into the patient and allowing the thymus to form fully functioning immune cells, the risk of rejection in the patient’s body is reduced.
Smart Immune launched in July 2017. Since then they have had one seed round raising €2.8 Million. Smart Immune is founded by Karine Rossignol, PharmD, Marina Cavazzane, MD, PhD, and Isabelle Andre, PhD. Rossignol is currently appointed as Smart Immune’s CEO. Rossignol brings over 25 years of management experience. Prior, she was CEO of the French Foundation for Hearing.
Since its launch, the company has won “Best Therapeutic Innovation” and “Oncology Upward Investment” awards at the Meet2Win European Oncology Partnering Convention in May 2022. Co-founder and Chief Medical Office, Professor Marina Cavazzana was also awarded the Jose Carreras Award from the European Hematology Association.
The women-founded company was listed in the 2022 Prix Galien USA Award nominees for “Best Startup in Pharmaceutical or Biotechnology Industry.” This is an exciting opportunity for Smart Immune to build recognition in the US. “We aim to provide a solution for the 200,000 patients in the USA and Europe who are in need of a new immune system. Our goal is to develop ProTcell therapies to be able to treat any patient anytime anywhere” said Rossignol, CEO of Smart Immune. The company recently started its Phase I/II trial with ProTcellTM in adults with blood cancers. The trial will evaluate the safety and efficacy of the agent to accelerate immune reconstitution after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in adult patients with hematological malignancies. We can also anticipate a Series A round launched for the company at the end of 2022.
