ImmuneBridge recently announced it will make its platform available to partners – ranging from small biotech startups to established pharmaceutical companies. Therapeutic co-development partners will now be able to access its optimized end-to-end platform for allogeneic cell therapy development. This platform addresses persistent challenges in the cell therapy industry by integrating machine learning-enabled donor screening with affordable large-scale production of any kind of immune cell.

The expansion is supported by a second seed round led by NFX, with participation from One Way Ventures, M Ventures, Insight Partners, LongGame Ventures, T.Rx Capital, Healthspan Capital, Sand Hill Angels, and two independent investors. The $7.7M round brings ImmuneBridge’s total seed funding to nearly $20M and marks the largest investment LongGame Ventures has made to date.

ImmuneBridge has solved a problem that has long held back the cell therapy field – how to manufacture living cells at scale without sacrificing their potency. Today, large-scale cell therapy manufacturing is hindered by several obstacles. Donor cells vary widely in quality and performance, but it is difficult to screen their effectiveness to target specific conditions affordably and in high throughput. Furthermore, when immune stem cells are cultured in the lab, they often lose pluripotency – the ability to develop into functional immune cells of any lineage – making it extremely expensive to develop effective therapies at commercial scale.

ImmuneBridge developed a 2-pronged screening and manufacturing system to solve these issues for the company’s internal pipeline. First, its world-first disease-specific donor screening system reduces guesswork at the earliest stages of cell therapy development, selecting the most effective donors for a particular medical condition. Second, its proprietary small molecule preserves stem cell pluripotency even after repeated replications. These pluripotent immune stem cells can then be engineered and differentiated into T cells, NK cells, macrophages, and more for therapeutic use. Using this molecule, the company is capable of producing thousands of highly effective doses of any kind of immune cell from a single donor – a stark contrast to many other companies, whose methods can achieve only tens of doses per donor at most.

“Every emerging field matures by strengthening its foundation. In cell therapy, that foundation is manufacturing, and ImmuneBridge brings a compelling approach to overcoming long-standing bottlenecks,” said Dr. Robert Langer, ScD, Institute Professor at MIT and Executive Chairman & Chair of Scientific Advisory Board at T.Rx Capital.

Now that ImmuneBridge’s method has demonstrated success within its own pipeline, the company believes they can have a larger impact on the field as a whole if they allow external partners such as vendors or other therapeutics-focused companies to access their platform as well. The new funding will enable both advancement of their internal assets and the new focus on partnership development, which is expected to result in several new therapies across multiple distinct cell types advancing towards the clinic over the next two years.

These advances allow ImmuneBridge, and now their new co-development partners, to manufacture immune cell therapies at scale and affordably, without sacrificing quality.

Manufacturing is a keen problem in the field – new therapies are being developed that rely on novel cell types that don’t have established manufacturing methods. For example, macrophage therapies can reduce mortality due to liver fibrosis and neutrophil therapies may soon be used in the clinic for patients with severe infections. In addition to these cell types, ImmuneBridge can also enable manufacturing of natural killer cells for autoimmune disorders, T cells for cancer, and stem cells for immunodeficient patients.

In addition to its new partnership focus, ImmuneBridge has announced the appointment of a new CEO, Dr. Nina Horowitz, PhD and CTO, Rui Tostoes, PhD.  Dr. Horowitz’s path to the CEO role is personal. At age eight, she was rushed to the hospital with an ovarian teratoma – a rare tumor that can be malignant. She recovered, and the experience inspired a life-long mission to fight cancer. After earning her PhD from Stanford University, she joined ImmuneBridge as Head of Research, built the company’s donor screening system, rose to Chief Scientific Officer, and was promoted to CEO in 2025.

“Cell therapy has incredible potential to further revolutionize the treatment of cancer and a number of other diseases, but manufacturing has been a huge impediment,” said Dr. Horowitz. “If you can’t make these therapies reliably and at scale, they won’t reach the people who need them. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.”

Rui Tostoes, PhD, who was recently appointed Chief Technology Officer, has spent his career designing and validating cell therapy manufacturing systems. “My entire career has been about one question,” Tostoes said. “How do we make these therapies cheaper and reliable enough to help everyone – not just a handful of patients? At ImmuneBridge, we’re finally aligning the biology with the engineering, and we’re seeing true scalability as a result,” he added.

Semyon Dukach, Founding Partner of One Way Ventures, added: “Manufacturing is the difference between hypotheticals and saving lives. ImmuneBridge is putting in place the systems that could make an entire class of therapies affordable and accessible.”

ImmuneBridge is currently collaborating with more than a dozen partners across a variety of cell types, with the goal of bringing ten therapies to the clinic in the next ten years. They expect to generate animal data validating the efficacy of their cells early this year, with initial human trials currently slated to begin in 2028.

ImmuneBridge is a first-in-class integrated screening and manufacturing platform for cell therapy development. ImmuneBridge is developing the next generation of allogeneic cellular medicines to make curative cancer therapies accessible to everyone, starting with NK cell-based immunotherapies. ImmuneBridge’s proprietary expansion technology amplifies cord blood-derived immune stem cells while maintaining full immune multipotency—to create a consistent and abundant cellular source for immunotherapies. ImmuneBridge’s scientific approach harnesses this expansion technology along with the unique benefits of umbilical cord blood to enable robust screening and selection for the most potent cancer-fighting cells. For more information, visit www.immunebridge.com.