RARE Daily

Magenta Raises $86.4 Million to Advance Novel Antibody-Drug Conjugate Conditioning Platform

May 13, 2021

Magenta Therapeutics said it has agreed to sell approximately 9.6 million shares of its common stock to certain institutional investors in a private placement to raise $86.4 million, before deducting estimated offering expenses.

Magenta is focused on developing medicines to bring the curative power of stem cell transplantation therapies to more patients with blood cancers, genetic diseases, and autoimmune diseases. Many genetic therapies require conditioning before administration.

Conditioning is a critical component necessary to prepare a patient’s body to receive the edited cells, which carry the corrected gene and must engraft in the patient’s bone marrow to be effective. Today’s conditioning regimens rely on nonspecific chemotherapy or radiation, which are associated with significant toxicities. Magenta’s antibody drug conjugate MGTA-117 precisely targets only hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, sparing immune cells. It has shown high selectivity, potent efficacy, wide safety margins and broad tolerability in non-human primate models. MGTA-117 may be capable of clearing space in bone marrow to support long-term engraftment and rapid recovery in patients.

Magenta has collaborations with Avrobio to evaluate its lead therapeutic, MGTA-117 in conjunction with one or more of Avrobio’s experimental lentiviral gene therapies; with Beam Therapeutics for conditioning of patients with sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia who are receiving Beam’s base editing therapies; and with Bluebird Bio to evaluate the utility of MGTA-145, in combination with plerixafor, for mobilization and collection of stem cells in adults and adolescents with sickle cell disease.

Author: Rare Daily Staff

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