“That helped crystallize it because I knew I really believed in what we were doing,” Sharei says. “I was just nervous about that next step, and those ‘follow your heart’ words were really what I needed to hear.
The clinical cell stage therapy company will use the funds to expand its cellular vaccine platform , into infectious diseases, and development of a system that would allow it to produce these cell therapies at the hospitals.SQZ Biotech’s current focus is on engineering the immune system with SQZ Antigen Presenting Cells for oncology and infectious diseases, SQZ Activating Antigen Carriers for oncology, and SQZ Tolerizing Antigen Carriers for immune tolerance.
Of these, the company’s first SQZ-APC product, against HPV and solid tumor, is in a Phase 1 multi-center clinical trial. “The main program is for cancer where we take certain immune cells from a patient and we engineer them to act like the generals of the immune system so their function becomes telling other immune cells what to attack,” Sharei says.
The technology engineers these cells to show the rest of the immune system pieces of the tumor and when they do that, it causes an activation of the immune system that’s specific to the tumor, and they can try to destroy it. SQZ Biotech develops the product in partnership with Swiss pharmaceutical behemoth Roche, with whom SQZ shares the commercialization rights.