Appia Bio’s shutdown continues an unfortunate trend this year that has seen biotech closures nearly every month.
After just four years in business, cell therapy company Appia Bio is shutting down its operations, joining the growing list of startups that have thrown in the towel this year.
“I am saddened to share that we decided to wind down Appia Bio,” CEO JeenJoo Kang wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Without further funding available to test in patients, heartbreakingly, we had reached the end of our road.”
Appia emerged from stealth in May 2021 with $52 million in series A funding aimed at developing off-the-shelf cell therapies for a variety of oncology indications. The biotech was founded a year earlier by a group of experts including alums from Kite Pharma, Nobel laureate David Baltimore as chairman of the board and academic experts in genetics and chemical engineering.
At the core of Appia’s business is a drug development engine that generates CAR-engineered natural killer T cells, which can then be frozen until they need to be used to treat a patient, according to the company’s website.
Attracted by this technology, Kite in August 2021 partnered with Appia to advance stem cell-derived cell therapies for hematologic cancers. The collaboration covered two candidates and carried a potential $875 million value, including an upfront consideration and milestone payments.
Before reaching the end of its financial line, Appia “got to the cusp of filing our IND [investigational new drug] for clinical testing,” Kang wrote on Monday.
Appia is hardly the only biotech startup to fold under the heavy funding headwinds across the industry. Just this month, Abata Therapeutics decided to close up shop due to “the current fundraising environment,” a spokesperson from Third Rock Ventures confirmed to BioSpace on Aug. 13. Abata, which had been developing regulatory T cell therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, launched in 2021 with support from Third Rock.
Days earlier, NextRNA Therapeutics CEO Dominique Verhelle revealed that the startup would also shut down. Several other companies have bowed out of the market, including Oncternal Therapeutics in July, National Resilience in June and Vor Bio in May.
Also in May, iTeos Therapeutics announced that after a brief strategic review, it had come to the decision to cease its operations and sell off its remaining assets and intellectual properties. The closure comes after iTeos lost a powerhouse partner in GSK, which earlier that month walked away from a 2021 pact to work on an anti-TIGIT therapy for cancer.
