BrainChild Bio Raises $116M Series A for Childhood Brain Cancer
Fundraise Insider tracks newly funded startups each week and delivers verified sales leads of C-suite contacts straight to your inbox, so you reach the right people while the funding is still fresh. See pricing.
BrainChild Bio, a clinical-stage biotech company in Seattle, Washington, has raised $116 million to push an experimental CAR T cell therapy for one of the deadliest childhood brain cancers into a pivotal trial. The company announced the round on September 8, 2026.
The Series A was led by an undisclosed private family fund and foundation. Seattle Children’s, the company’s first investor, participated, as did new investor WRF Capital.
Most of the money will fund a Phase 2 clinical trial of a therapy for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, a rare brainstem tumor that mainly strikes children between ages 5 and 10 and has very few treatment options. Roughly 300 children in the United States are diagnosed each year. Radiation is the current standard of care, and median overall survival is about 11 months.
BrainChild Bio builds on CAR T technology developed at Seattle Children’s and licensed exclusively to the company in 2023. The approach genetically engineers a patient’s own T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells. The therapy has now entered the ILLUMINATE Phase 2 study, a registration-stage trial that could eventually back an application to the US Food and Drug Administration.
DIPG is unusually hard to treat because the tumor sits in the brainstem, which controls basic bodily functions, and because the blood-brain barrier can keep drugs from reaching it. BrainChild Bio’s method delivers CAR T cells directly into cerebrospinal fluid through an implanted catheter, so the cells reach the tumor locally and can potentially be given repeatedly.
Part of the financing will also advance a second CAR T therapy aimed at three different cancer markers toward first clinical testing in glioblastoma.
The company was founded by Michael Jensen, who helped develop the underlying science at Seattle Children’s and co-founded Umoja Biopharma and Juno Therapeutics. CEO Steven Brugger previously founded and led Affinivax, which GSK acquired for $3.3 billion in 2022.
Contract research organizations, manufacturing partners, and other suppliers to cell therapy developers can get verified contacts at newly funded biotech companies each week through B2B Lead Generation For BioTech.