RegCell Secures $44M Series A Plus $22M AMED Grant
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RegCell, a biotech company working on regulatory T cell therapies for autoimmune disease, has secured $66 million in new funding. The total combines a fully subscribed $44 million Series A with a $22 million non-dilutive grant from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, known as AMED.
The company is headquartered in Emeryville, California. Playground Global led the equity round. Global Brain, Mitsui Chemicals Group, LG Technology Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and Medical Incubator Japan participated, along with existing investors Fast Track Initiative, UTEC, OSAKA University Venture Capital, and Kyoto University Innovation Capital. Jory Bell of Playground Global will join the board of directors.
The money will carry the company’s epigenetic reprogramming platform into clinical-stage development across several autoimmune indications. Specifically, it will fund an investigational new drug application, the generation of human proof-of-concept data, and expansion into additional autoimmune diseases. The AMED award is earmarked for the next generation of the platform and for moving a second autoimmune program through Phase II proof-of-concept.
This is RegCell’s second AMED award. The first, a $37.3 million grant in 2024, supported development of the platform’s first generation through clinical proof-of-concept in autoimmune liver diseases.
The science traces back to the discovery of regulatory T cells, or Tregs, by Nobel Laureate and company co-founder Shimon Sakaguchi. RegCell’s platform produces stable, epigenetically reprogrammed, antigen-specific Tregs meant to restore immune tolerance even when the pathogenic antigens are unknown or multiple, and it does so without gene engineering. The company says that approach allows simpler manufacturing, a better safety profile, and greater scalability than current autoimmune therapies, which broadly suppress the immune system without addressing the root cause of disease.
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