Portofolio

Vittoria Biotherapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage immunotherapy company, is developing novel CAR T cell therapies that transcend the limitations of current cell therapies. Based on technology exclusively licensed from the University of Pennsylvania, the Company’s proprietary Senza5™ platform unlocks the cytotoxic potential of engineered T cells and utilizes a five-day manufacturing process to maximize stemness, durability, and potency. By acting on the fundamental biology of T cells, Senza5 can be used to improve the efficacy of engineered T cell therapies with pipeline applications in solid tumors and autoimmune diseases.

Latus Bio is a patient-centric and product-oriented gene therapy company founded by members of the academic lab of Professor Beverly Davidson, a co-founder of Spark Therapeutics and Chief Scientific Strategy Officer of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Its proprietary AAV capsids have been identified by screening tens of millions of novel variants directly in non-human primates, using optimized routes for clinical administration. In preclinical studies, Latus’s product candidates exhibited high gene expression in precise locations in the central nervous system (CNS) with cellular specificity and minimal off-tissue activity. As a result, Latus plans to administer low doses of its product candidates, with the goal of improving clinical safety and enabling successful manufacturing. Latus is advancing a robust pipeline of product candidates in development for both rare and common CNS diseases.

Hula Therapeutics is a clinical-stage immunotherapy spinout from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Hula’s platform technology allows the identification of highly specific, functionally-relevant immunotherapy targets that are essential to tumors and presented on the cell surface via the Human Leukocyte Antigen system. While many of these molecules were considered “undruggable" and go unrecognized by the native immune response, the company’s technology can make them druggable by precisely engineering its therapies to maximize tumor killing, while minimizing healthy tissue toxicity, thereby unlocking the potential of immunotherapy for patients with solid tumors.

MasterSwitch Bio is a joint spinout of the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania, co-founded by 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine Dr. Drew Weissman. The Company has developed a modified mRNA therapy targeting Hepatocyte Nuclear Factor-4 alpha (HNF4α), the master transcriptional regulator of hepatic function, for the treatment of End Stage Liver Disease with cirrhosis. In multiple cirrhotic disease models, upregulation of HNF4α restores expression of downstream proteins critical to hepatocyte health, including those governing lipid metabolism, albumin synthesis, and coagulation, thereby restoring hepatic function.

Ladder Bio (formerly ThirdLaw Molecular), a spinout of Temple University, developed a novel chemical platform of synthetic, modular, fused-ring peptide-like structures with a diverse range of functional groups, allowing exquisite control of their molecular shapes. The resulting molecules, called Spiroligomers™, are designed to be orally available, cell permeable, and engage challenging biological targets with high affinity and selectivity. Using this platform, Ladder Bio is designing and synthesizing libraries of billions of unique, elegantly structured, chemically diverse Spiroligomers™ for highly selective binding of proteins of biologic interest.