SHCell Closes ￥500M Series D1 Financing

(VCBeat) Mar. 23, 2021 -- On March 19, 2021, Shanghai Cell Therapy Group Co., Ltd. ("SHCell") announced the smooth completion of the Series D1 financing of nearly 500 million yuan. The previous investor Haier Capital joined this round along with Jiuzhou Venture, Sun Rock Capital, and CCB International. SHCell plans to use the funds for product R&D, talent recruitment and clinical trials. CEC Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor in this transaction.

SHCell is a leading company in the cell-based immunotherapy market in China, and a platform company that is the first in the world to construct the closed-loop chain covering "R&D of new drugs, clinical treatment of cancer to cell preservation services". Founded in 2013, the company has been committed to using cell technology to treat tumors. In 2020, SHCell has met a series of major milestones.

Shanghai Mengchao Cancer Hospital, with an investment of 800 million RMB and featuring cell therapy established by SHCell, was officially inaugurated and became an affiliated hospital of Shanghai University. The goal of the hospital is to build a first-class precision medicine center, a top clinical research hospital featuring "immunotherapy+", and a first-class clinical trial base and transformation application platform for cell therapy.

Schell's CD19-CAR T cell therapy by non-viral vectors" (BZ019) has made patient enrollment in clinical trials, which let it become the first company in China to enter the clinic stage of the CAR-T cell therapy product by non-vital vectors.

Following the establishment of Henan SHCell in 2019, SHCell has successively set up several branches nationwide in 2020.

At the same time, the world-class cell production center of SHCell will be completed by the end of April 2021, with a construction area of 16,000 square meters. The center has a whole-process sealed cell drug production system that meets the highest level of drug production standards at home and abroad, and can realize the preparation of CAR-T cells from 20,000 patients per year.

In 2020, SHCell has cooperated with the University of Southern California to carry out the R&D of hematopoietic stem cell unlimited expansion technology, and has also partnered with Shanghai University, Danaher Group and other Fortune 500 companies to explore precision medicine.

After Professor Zhu Weimin, the inventor of the rabbit monoclonal antibody technology, joined SHCell and served as the chief technology officer (CTO) of the company, Mr. Liu Changgong, a tenured professor at the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Research Center and Anderson Cancer Cancer Hospital, also become a member of the group in 2020.