OverT Bio Raises $16 Million, Tapping Innovative Reprogramming of Immune Cells to Deliver Next-Generation Therapies

OverT Bio, a data-driven company working to unlock the curative potential of cell therapies in solid tumors, announced today that it has raised $16 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by ARTIS Ventures and Wing VC, with participation from Fusion Fund, OMX Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, Gaingels, Civilization Ventures, Hawktail, and Cancer Research Institute. The funding will go toward expanding discovery platforms focused on addressing the primary barriers for cell therapy, leading to durable and curative treatments for advanced solid tumors.

OverT is the first to use patients' immune response to cancer to find new receptors and targets that can be applied across the human population. The team searches the entire human genome to find new ways to make cell therapies more durable and capable of destroying cancers. The foundational science has been featured in leading scientific and medical journals, such as Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine.

"Cell therapies have shown, at least in blood cancers, that we can aim to completely cure patients that have even the most advanced diseases rather than just prolong their survival," said Dr. Mat Legut, co-founder and CEO of OverT. "With OverT's ability to rapidly screen and engineer thousands of genes, we are building next-generation therapies to cure advanced cancers of the solid tissues."

OverT Bio combines cutting-edge cell engineering technologies with big data approaches to address major unmet medical needs in solid tumors. OverT has developed unique massively parallel genetic screening, single-cell multiomic, and synthetic biology platforms to build next-generation cell therapies. OverT's core platform searches every gene in the genome to identify the best genetic modifications to endow immune cells with novel properties. The company has also built a similarly high-throughput approach to discover new receptors and targets that are both safe and efficacious.

"The OverT team is supercharging cell therapies and finding new cures for cancer," said Sara Choi, partner at Wing VC. "They're a company that thinks differently and is guided by cutting-edge science ? new ways to reprogram T cells, a new class of safe and broadly cancer-specific receptors often ignored by most immunologists. We look forward to supporting the team as they explore the edges of what's possible in biotech."

"Everything OverT does is based on a patient-centric mission and focused on developing therapies that extend and enhance the lives of cancer patients," said Dr. Vasudev Bailey, partner at ARTIS Ventures. "OverT's approaches to modifying cell behavior and for receptor discovery are highly differentiated from everything else out there. Instead of making incremental tweaks to existing therapies, OverT is making bold bets on how to create truly transformative cell therapies."

Leveraging decades of experience in cell therapy and immunology, OverT's founding team has built a large intellectual property portfolio encompassing multiple discovery platforms and preclinical assets. Co-founder and CEO, Dr. Mat Legut, is an immunologist and entrepreneur with a track record of translating discoveries into clinical products, and co-founder, Dr. Neville Sanjana, is a faculty member at the New York Genome Center and NYU, and a pioneer in CRISPR and high-throughput functional genomics.

To learn more about OverT, please visit overt.bio.

About OverT Bio

OverT Bio is developing effective and safe cellular therapies for solid tumors. Founded in 2022 by Dr. Mat Legut and Dr. Neville Sanjana, OverT has pioneered new pooled functional screening and synthetic genomics platforms (OverTargettm and OverTCRtm) to develop next-generation engineered immune cells. OverT is based in New York and has raised $16 million in total funding from investors, including Alexandria Venture Investments, ARTIS Ventures, Cancer Research Institute, Civilization Ventures, Fusion Fund, Gaingels, Hawktail, OMX Ventures and Wing VC. For more information, visit overt.bio.