Tikva Allocell Pte. Ltd. (Tikva), a Singapore-based biotechnology company, has on Wednesday announced the closing of an $8 million Series A financing led by Kantharos Capital.
Proceeds will fund IND-enabling activities and a planned year-end 2026 Investigational New Drug (IND) submission for TAVST01, Tikva’s lead candidate for B7-H3-positive solid tumors, Tikva said in a statement.
Subject to regulatory clearance, the company plans to initiate a Phase 1 clinical trial in patients with advanced B7-H3-positive cancer at sites in Singapore and the United States.
TAVST01 targets B7-H3, a protein expressed across a broad range of difficult-to-treat solid tumors, including lung, breast, prostate, pancreatic, and pediatric cancers.
Unlike conventional donor-derived cell therapies, which a patient’s immune system often clears before they can work, TAVST01 is built from Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-specific T cells – immune cells the body naturally sustains – and is engineered to resist that rejection, with preclinical potential both to kill tumor cells directly and to remodel the immunosuppressive microenvironment that has limited cell therapies in solid tumors.
That durability is no accident: almost everyone carries EBV from a past infection the immune system never fully clears, so the body keeps a standing population of these virus-specific T cells on patrol for years – exactly the staying power that donor-derived cell therapies have struggled to achieve.
“Cell therapy has transformed the treatment of blood cancers but has repeatedly stalled at the solid-tumor door – the donor cells either fail to persist or are eliminated by the patient’s immune system before they can act,
“We started from a different place: a virus-fighting T cell the body naturally sustains, armed to seek out B7-H3 and engineered to withstand the rejection that defeats most donor-derived approaches, with minimal gene editing,” said Ivan Horak, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tikva Allocell.
With this financing, he said the firm is well positioned to complete IND-enabling studies and advance TAVST01 toward its planned IND submission, bringing us closer to delivering a scalable, readily available, and potentially transformative cell therapy for patients with solid tumors.
Tikva’s therapies are built on the ALLO SerpinB9 EBVST platform — an allogeneic, virus‑specific T‑cell technology licensed exclusively from Baylor College of Medicine and further enhanced through Tikva’s proprietary protein‑engineering strategies.
These cells are equipped with a B7‑H3–targeting receptor and an optimized form of SerpinB9, a natural inhibitor of granzyme B, the enzyme immune cells use to kill their targets. Because a patient’s immune system would normally attack donor cells using granzyme B, the SerpinB9 “armor” enables Tikva’s cells to resist rejection and remain active.
At the same time, the approach minimizes graft‑versus‑host disease (GvHD) with only minimal gene editing.
“Our investment reflects strong conviction in both Tikva’s science and its leadership team. Tikva is addressing fundamental challenges that have constrained allogeneic cell therapies, and we believe its ALLO SerpinB9 EBVST platform can extend the reach of cell therapy to solid-tumor patients who today have limited options,
“We look forward to supporting the company toward IND submission and clinical evaluation,” said Terence Tan, Managing Partner at Kantharos Capital.