Inceptor, a new Triangle biotech startup, raises $26M to fund cancer treatments

Inceptor Bio, a recently founded biotechnology company searching for cancer treatments, says it has raised $26 million from investors and is on the hunt for manufacturing space in the Triangle.

The startup was founded last year, but has remained under the radar while it searched for funding and potential gene therapy treatments to develop.

The company’s founder and CEO, Shailesh Maingi, said Inceptor plans to license technology from universities and then move to commercialize it. The company has already inked a few deals, including one with UNC-Chapel Hill, though it declined to release specifics.

Inceptor’s funding round was led by Kineticos Disruptor Fund, a life science investment vehicle managed by the Triangle-based consulting firm Kieticos. Maingi previously worked at Kineticos and is a veteran of the Triangle biotech scene.

“We have a simple mission,” Maingi said in a video interview, “and the mission is to advance gene and cell therapies to cure cancer.”

While great strides have been made in cancer treatment, he said, it is “still a leading cause of death.”

Gene therapy appears to be a promising avenue for treatment, Maingi said. A lot of money is flowing into gene therapy companies, which up until just a few years ago had never seen an approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The Triangle has become a hub for the fledgling sector, landing a number of expansions in the past few years. Notably, the UNC gene therapy spin-out AskBio was acquired last year by Bayer in a deal worth up to $4 billion.

Gene therapies treat diseases in multiple ways, including by replacing mutated genes that cause a disease with healthy ones, or by knocking out a mutated gene and adding a new gene to counteract a disease. Cell therapies operate by injecting patients with different types of white blood cells that are able to fight diseases.

But gene and cell therapies vary in mechanism and effectiveness.

“It’s not clear what technology is going to work out,” Maingi said. “So our strategy has been to go after all of these technologies and have multiple platforms.”

For example, CAR-T therapy, which engineers T cells to attack cancer cells, has shown success with blood cancers, but has been less effective on solid tumors, said Mike Nicholson, the company’s chief scientific officer.

“We’re going in eyes wide open, saying, ‘We can’t focus on being a one-drug company,’” Nicholson said. “To really make a big dent, we need to be open to multiple modalities.”

To find those different options, the company has been in talks with universities all across the country for the past year, looking for science with good data and exclusivity.

The goal is to take promising intellectual property and move it into Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials. It will probably take a few years before any of the company’s potential assets are ready for clinical trials, Maingi said.

Maingi said Inceptor hopes to finalize a lease for around 25,000 square feet of manufacturing and research space in the Research Triangle Park area in the coming weeks. Most of the company’s seed funding will go toward that space and hiring around 50 to 75 people by the end of next year. Maingi said he anticipates raising more money soon.

Inceptor believes controlling its own manufacturing facility, rather than contracting with another firm, will be important going forward, especially as companies compete for workers with gene therapy expertise.

“We did a pretty broad assessment of whether we should build our own facility or whether we should outsource and contract out,” Maingi said. “Ultimately (contracting) was going to take too long. ... We would have been sitting in a queue for two years.”

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate