Sesen Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company focused on bladder cancer treatment, and Penn startup Carisma Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing innovative immunotherapies, announced that they entered into a definitive merger agreement to combine the two companies in an all-stock transaction.
The combined company, which will operate under the name Carisma Therapeutics Inc., will focus on advancing Carisma’s proprietary cell therapy platform that utilizes engineered macrophages and monocytes to potentially transform the treatment of cancer and other serious disorders.Carisma is pioneering the development of chimeric antigen receptor macrophage (CAR-M) therapies and is believed to be the only company currently developing CAR-M therapies with demonstrated proof of mechanism and safety data in clinical trials. Read more here.