Presage Biosciences Receives Strategic Investment from Takeda

Presage Biosciences has secured a strategic investment from Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, through its venture capital arm, Takeda Ventures, Inc. Terms are not disclosed.

“Takeda and Presage have had an extraordinarily collaborative and productive research alliance over the past 3 years,” said Nathan Caffo, President of Presage. “We continue to focus together on applying Presage’s CIVO technology across the development pipeline at Takeda, from identifying novel drug combinations to translating that work to the clinic.”

“Takeda Ventures is committed to investing in truly innovative technological approaches to make new treatments available for patients with cancer,” added Graeme Martin, CEO of Takeda Ventures. “Presage’s CIVO technology holds promise to better translate preclinical discoveries to patients, particularly in the field of novel cancer drug combinations.”

Presage technology can be used to evaluate up to eight combinations of drugs or individual compounds, both investigational and approved, all without exposing patients to the toxicity of systemic dosing.

Presage is validating its CIVO platform in the veterinary oncology setting in canine patients and expects to commence its second clinical study of the platform with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Q1 of 2016 in patients with soft tissue sarcomas. CIVO also is being employed in preclinical models to discover and evaluate novel combinations of cancer drugs.