Celaid Therapeutics

About Celaid Therapeutics

Celaid Therapeutics Inc. is a Japanese biotechnology firm established on October 8, 2020, as a spin-off from the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba. The company was co-founded by CEO Nobuyuki Arakawa, Motoo Watanabe, Satoshi Yamazaki, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi. Arakawa brings a wealth of experience from consulting at Accenture to managing and reforming ventures in AI, IoT, and healthcare. The foundational technology originated from research by Professors Satoshi Yamasaki and Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who developed a method for the large-scale in-vitro expansion of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs).

The company is focused on developing and commercializing a regenerative medicine platform centered on its proprietary human hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) expansion technology. This technology addresses a significant challenge in cell therapy: the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient quantity of high-quality HSCs for treatment. Celaid's method allows for the large-volume in-vitro expansion of HSCs from sources like bone marrow, umbilical cord blood, and peripheral blood, using a chemically defined, albumin-free culture medium which enables easier quality control and cost reduction.

Celaid Therapeutics operates in the cell and gene therapy market, targeting treatments for blood cancers like leukemia, as well as genetic and other intractable blood disorders. Its business model encompasses several areas: providing research support through media and reagents, developing cell therapy products for HSC transplantation, and creating cell therapy products combined with gene-editing technology. The company's value chain involves receiving cells from donors or patients, expanding or editing them in their facilities to meet specific treatment needs, and then providing the high-quality, safe cell therapy products back to hospitals. The firm also plans to license its platform technology through collaborations with other startups and pharmaceutical companies.

The lead program, designated CLD-001, is an ex-vivo expanded HSC therapy developed for severe pediatric non-malignant diseases. By using frozen cord blood and expanding the low HSC counts, CLD-001 aims to provide patients with an optimal HLA-matched product, potentially improving survival rates post-transplantation. The company has secured significant funding to advance its pipeline, including a Series A round totaling 1.2 billion JPY and a substantial non-dilutive grant of up to 2.7 billion JPY (approx. $19M USD) from the Japanese Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED).