Metuchen-based Tevogen Bio has received a strategic investment by HMP Partners of New Jersey, a life sciences investment firm managed by medical doctors.
Tevogen’s next-generation precision T-cell platform is designed to provide increased target specificity to eliminate malignant and viral infected cells, while allowing healthy cells to remain intact. Tevogen believes that this “off-the-shelf” convenience will make it possible to develop T-cell therapies with greater convenience, unprecedented speed, and at a much lower cost than currently available platforms, such as CAR-T. This creates an opportunity to dramatically improve health outcomes for large patient populations battling common life-threatening cancers and viral infections.
“We are excited to continue to partner with this exceptional group of investors who, as medical experts, are keenly in tune with what we see as the vast potential of personalized CD8+ Cytotoxic T lymphocytes for therapeutic purposes,” Tevogen CEO Dr. Ryan Saadi said. “The Tevogen team has developed an innovative technology that we believe will enable development of affordable T-cell therapies for millions of patients suffering from cancers and viral infections, and we are gratified that HMP Partners has invested again.”
“We have experienced how disruptive technologies like Tevogen’s precision T-cell platform can bring profound changes to medicine, and are impressed by the accomplishments and business acumen Tevogen leadership has shown in a short 18 months,” said Hema Patel, managing partner of HMP Partners. “We are excited to make another investment in Tevogen’s ingenuity and are hopeful Tevogen’s novel business model, built on bringing life-saving therapies to large patient populations, will become the gold standard in the biopharma industry and usher in a new frontier of medicine. We believe Tevogen has significant potential, and based on a discounted cash flow analysis, think the company’s valuation even today could be in excess of $5 billion.”
The investment from HMP Partners will allow Tevogen to expedite expansion of its development pipeline; in particular, of its lead candidate TVGN-489, a COVID-19 specific CD8+ T lymphocyte investigational product that is in a proof-of-concept trial.
