Seattle-based BrainChild Bio, Inc., a clinical-stage company developing CAR T cell therapies for central nervous system tumors, has closed a USD 116 million Series A financing to fund a pivotal registrational trial in diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a uniformly fatal pediatric brainstem cancer affecting roughly 300 children annually in the US, where median overall survival on standard-of-care radiation therapy is approximately 11 months.
An undisclosed private family fund and foundation led the round, with participation from Seattle Children's — the company's founding institutional backer — and WRF Capital, the investment arm of the Washington Research Foundation, as a new investor. Proceeds will primarily support the ILLUMINATE Phase II study (NCT07680439), a pivotal, single-arm registrational trial designed to support a future Biologics License Application (BLA) with the US FDA for BCB-276, the company's B7-H3-targeted autologous CAR T cell therapy. Additional funds will advance BCB-214, a triple-targeting CAR T candidate directed at B7-H3, EGFR, and IL13Rα2 in glioblastoma, toward initial clinical testing. Before this round, BrainChild Bio had operated on Seattle Children's founding equity investment and a USD 300,000 manufacturing grant from ScaleReady, awarded in January 2025.
BrainChild Bio was spun out of Seattle Children's in January 2024 under an exclusive license to CAR T cell technology developed by Dr. Michael Jensen, the company's founder and Chief Scientific Officer, whose lab at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research at Seattle Children's Research Institute generated the foundational clinical data underpinning the programs. The Phase II trial builds on the BrainChild-03 Phase I study, which reported a median overall survival of 19.8 months in DIPG patients — data that supported FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for BCB-276 in April 2025 and a Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation the following month.
BCB-276 is administered locoregionally via an indwelling reservoir-catheter directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, bypassing the blood-brain barrier and enabling repetitive dosing without systemic lymphodepletion. BCB-214 adds multiplex antigen targeting to address tumor heterogeneity and antigen escape in glioblastoma, incorporating a PD-1/MyD88 fusion transgene designed to convert immunosuppressive signaling into a CAR T cell-activating signal. Topline data from the ILLUMINATE trial are expected in 2028.
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