In recent weeks, two local health care companies have emerged from stealth mode – in short, announcing themselves and their technologies to the world.

Westwood-based cell therapy biotech company ImmunoVec Inc. emerged from its under-the-radar phase on Oct. 8 with its announcement on receiving a $40.7 million grant from the federal agency, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, to further its development of precision cell therapy technology that targets autoimmune diseases and conditions.

“This (grant) will fund us all the way up to our first human clinical trial,” said Ryan Wong, ImmunoVec’s co-founder and chief executive. “If we execute properly on this, it will be a demonstration of us becoming a powerhouse in biotech innovations.”

Two weeks earlier, Woodland Hills-based medAstra Inc. announced its presence as a company adapting its medication and sample collection adherence platform used on space missions to post-operative and self-care situations here on Earth. The company had recently signed up its first medical practice client, a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon’s office.

“We’ve been quietly building our business for the last nine months or so and we felt that now, with our first client under our belt, it’s time to take on a higher profile,” said Savi Glowe, medAstra’s co-founder and chief executive.

Pursuing precision cell therapy

ImmunoVec got its start from Wong’s doctoral thesis, which focused on how to better regulate implanted genes so that when they are switched on, their impact is limited to the targeted diseased cells and not the cells in nearby and otherwise healthy organs and tissues.

Wong said that most cell therapy companies have had limited success in this targeting because they have been using delivery platforms similar to those used for vaccines that disperse throughout the body. The more that the genetically altered cells come into contact with organs and tissues that are not the intended target, the greater the risk of toxic reactions, he added.

After some experimentation, Wong and his team of researchers at UCLA came up with a biodegradable polymer that can deliver DNA payloads to the desired target.

“We have pioneered the DNA payload vehicle that has much higher precision,” Wong said. An added benefit, he said, is the relatively lower cost of biodegradable polymers.

Wong and his team decided to try to commercialize this approach to DNA delivery. In 2019, they founded ImmunoVec – short for “immunotherapy vector,” referring to the delivery path for immunotherapy. They quickly raised $4.3 million in seed funding.

One early supporter was William Woodward, a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur who is now managing general partner at Santa Monica-based Anthem Venture Partners. He is also board chair of ImmunoVec.

“We had been searching for our next cell and gene therapy program to support,” Woodward said. “Then Ryan pitched what was essentially his dissertation to us. That’s when we decided to give our support.”

Stream of grants for ImmunoVec

That seed round was followed by a series of three grants totaling $11 million from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, or CIRM, which was set up after voters statewide passed a $3 billion stem cell research initiative in 2004.

Wong said ImmunoVec’s first focus has been on treating autoimmune diseases, especially lupus. The research has been conducted at the Magnify Incubator at the California NanoSystems Institute on UCLA’s Westwood campus.

“What we’re able to do with our novel polymer-based nanoparticle is directly target specialized immune cells that (in turn) can recognize the pathogenic cells that cause lupus,” he said. “In the future, we can expand this to a range of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis or ulcerative colitis.”

As the company was racking up the CIRM grants, it also sought federal funds, entering with other research partners a competitive grant round from ARPA-H’s Engineering of Immune Cells Inside the Body (EMBODY) program. The other research partners are from several institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

In addition to this $40.7 million grant, ImmunoVec also is using its platform to create precision cell therapies for other autoimmune diseases and disorders such as multiple sclerosis, as well as solid tumors, and other genetic disorders. To help fund these research programs, board chair Woodward said the company is actively pursuing series A financing.  

From space to Earth

MedAstra traces its beginnings to the nation’s space program. More than a decade ago, Glowe, who was at the time working in the genetics lab at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (the flagship hospital of the Mount Sinai Health System), was collaborating with a genetics lab at Cornell University headed by Christopher Mason. His lab had previously done work for NASA’s space program, specifically collecting genetic samples from famous identical twin-brother astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly. (Mark Kelly later went on to become a U.S. Senator from Arizona.) In 2021, Mason’s lab had a contract with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. – now based in Starbase, Texas, but at that time based in Hawthorne – to conduct genetic studies on the first private citizen crew in space.

According to Glowe, she and Mason were talking after that mission and saw the need for an organization to help adapt medical technologies used for and by space-based crews to more general medical practices on the ground. In 2023, Glowe and Mason spearheaded the launch of this nonprofit, which they called BioAstra. The first identified need was for detailed instruction packets for sample collection and medication packaging/adherence.

This point was driven home when the pair were putting together sample collection kits for a SpaceX crewed mission.

“We sent out materials to the collection location to collect the blood samples for the astronauts,” Glowe said. “When we got them back, some of the samples that were collected were put into the wrong tubes, which completely broke up the research design protocols. We then put a second set of glass (collection) tubes into coolers with dry ice, only to discover that many of the tubes were cracked in half.”

Such problems are huge when working on space missions, Glowe said – “There is only one chance to get things right.” Challenges abound in the earth-based world as well.

“When a patient comes out of surgery, usually either they – or family members – are sent home with an often hastily-stapled packet of information that can be very confusing, especially for older patients,” Glowe said. “A huge problem is that patients are on their own to take the pills out of the prescription bottles and put them into other daily pill containers. That can be a lot of work for a senior who is in a lot of pain.”

Similar information packets are increasingly common for ongoing self-care in the home, especially for seniors.

The aim of medAstra, Glowe said, is to bring the same level of rigor and protocols to these earthbound information and medication packets as has now been applied to space-based crews. Notably, she said, this includes putting the correct number of pills in each slot in pill-planner containers.

Landing first client

Armed with some “pre-seed” money from angel investors and Greenwich, Conn.-based WorldQuant Ventures, Glowe and Mason set about finding medical practitioners who felt their patients could benefit from more rigorous protocol packets and were willing to try medAstra’s product.

In recent months, the fledgling company landed its first client, an unidentified cosmetic surgery practice in Beverly Hills. For a set subscription price paid by the practice, medAstra prepares these medication and self-care protocol kits for all the patients of the practice.

Glowe said she uses third-party contractors to assemble the kits for distribution.

For the near term, Glowe said she plans to focus on signing up other cosmetic surgery practices for these subscription packages. The focus is on practices, not the direct-to-consumer market, she added.

Looking ahead, Glowe said medAstra plans to begin offering its own packets for space crews and for the burgeoning field of longevity medicine; that will take additional financing rounds.