For years, cell therapy has carried one of oncology’s most striking contradictions. It has changed the outlook for some blood cancer patients, yet has struggled to make the same impact in solid tumours, which account for the vast majority of cancer cases worldwide.
Singapore-based Tikva Allocell is trying to push through that wall with a different kind of off-the-shelf cell therapy. The biotechnology company has raised US$8 million in Series A financing led by Kantharos Capital, with the proceeds earmarked for studies needed before human testing and a planned Investigational New Drug, or IND, submission by the end of 2026.
Also Read: Singapore’s Biobot Surgical raises US$15.6M to take prostate-care robot global
If regulators clear the application, Tikva plans to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial of its lead candidate, TAVST01, in patients with advanced B7-H3-positive cancers at sites in Singapore and the US.
That dual geography matters. For Singapore, which has spent years building its biomedical research base, the trial would place a homegrown cell therapy company on a path that connects local clinical infrastructure with the world’s largest biotech market. For patients, the more important question is whether Tikva’s approach can solve a problem that has repeatedly defeated the field: how to make donor-derived immune cells survive long enough inside a patient to attack solid tumours.
A different starting point for cell therapy
TAVST01 targets B7-H3, a protein found across several difficult-to-treat solid tumours, including lung, breast, prostate, pancreatic and paediatric cancers. B7-H3 has attracted interest because it is often highly expressed on cancer cells and in the tumour microenvironment, while its presence in normal tissues appears more limited, making it a potential target for cancer therapies.
The company’s approach begins not with a generic donor T cell, but with Epstein-Barr virus-specific T cells. Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV, is extremely common; most adults carry it from a past infection, and the immune system typically keeps a long-lived population of EBV-fighting T cells on patrol. Tikva’s bet is that these cells may offer the durability that conventional donor-derived cell therapies have lacked.
“Cell therapy has transformed the treatment of blood cancers but has repeatedly stalled at the solid-tumour door; the donor cells either fail to persist or are eliminated by the patient’s immune system before they can act,” said Ivan Horak, founder and CEO of Tikva Allocell.
“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,” he added.
Also Read: AI is detecting cancer earlier in Southeast Asia but our policies and capital have not caught up
Tikva’s platform, called ALLO SerpinB9 EBVST, is licensed exclusively from Baylor College of Medicine and further enhanced through the company’s own protein-engineering work. The cells are fitted with a B7-H3-targeting receptor and an optimised version of SerpinB9, a naturally occurring inhibitor of granzyme B. Granzyme B is one of the enzymes immune cells use to kill their targets.
In simple terms, a patient’s immune system would normally recognise donor cells as foreign and attack them. Tikva’s SerpinB9 “armour” is designed to help the therapy resist that attack, remain active for longer, and reduce one of the central weaknesses of allogeneic, or donor-derived, cell therapy. The company also says the approach is designed to minimise graft-versus-host disease, a serious complication in which donor immune cells attack the patient’s healthy tissues, while requiring only limited gene editing.
Why solid tumours remain hard
The promise of cell therapy is best known through CAR-T treatments, where a patient’s immune cells are engineered to recognise cancer and then infused back into the body. These therapies have delivered strong results in some blood cancers, but solid tumours are a different battlefield.
Tumour masses are physically harder for immune cells to penetrate. They often create an immunosuppressive microenvironment, a local shield that weakens immune attacks. Antigens, the markers therapies use to identify cancer cells, can vary across tumour cells, allowing some cancer cells to escape. And when cells come from a donor rather than the patient, the recipient’s immune system may quickly eliminate them.
Allogeneic therapies are attractive because they can be manufactured in advance, stored, and potentially given to many patients without waiting weeks for a bespoke treatment. That could make them cheaper, faster and more scalable than patient-specific therapies. But the trade-off has been persistence: if the donor cells disappear too quickly, they may not have time to do meaningful work.
Tikva’s answer is to use a type of immune cell the body is already used to maintaining, then engineer it to both recognise B7-H3 and resist immune rejection. In preclinical work, the company says TAVST01 has shown potential to kill tumour cells directly and to remodel the tumour microenvironment that has held back other solid-tumour cell therapy attempts.
The next step is more demanding. IND-enabling studies will test whether the therapy is safe enough, consistent enough and well-characterised enough for regulators to allow human trials. For a young biotech, this stage is capital-intensive and unforgiving, which makes the Series A round central to Tikva’s timetable.
A Singapore biotech with global ambitions
Tikva’s financing also reflects a broader shift in Southeast Asia’s life sciences ecosystem. The region is better known in tech circles for fintech, e-commerce and logistics startups, but Singapore has long treated biomedical science as a strategic sector, supported by research institutes, hospital networks, manufacturing capacity and regulatory infrastructure.
Still, building a biotech company in Southeast Asia is very different from building a software startup. Timelines are longer, capital requirements are heavier, and the path to revenue usually runs through clinical data, regulatory approval and partnerships with larger pharmaceutical companies. For Singapore-based biotechs, the challenge is not only to do credible science, but to connect early research with global clinical and commercial pathways.
Tikva appears to be structuring itself with that in mind. By planning clinical sites in both Singapore and the US, it can anchor development in its home market while engaging the regulatory and clinical ecosystem that often determines whether biotech assets attract global investors, partners or acquirers.
“Our investment reflects strong conviction in both Tikva’s science and its leadership team,” said Terence Tan, Managing Partner at Kantharos Capital. “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-tumour patients who today have limited options.”
The competitive field
Tikva is entering a crowded and technically difficult race. Globally, companies such as Fate Therapeutics, Allogene Therapeutics, Caribou Biosciences, and Atara Biotherapeutics have explored allogeneic cell therapies, while larger pharmaceutical and biotech players continue to invest in CAR-T, T-cell receptor therapies and natural killer cell platforms. In solid tumours, B7-H3 is also being pursued through different modalities, including antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies and cell therapies. That means Tikva will not be judged on novelty alone. It will need to show that its EBV-specific, SerpinB9-armoured cells can persist, avoid serious safety issues, and generate signals of tumour activity in patients who have few remaining options.
Also Read: Danish startup Alcolase is betting its future on Asia’s drinking culture
For now, the company’s story remains preclinical. The US$8 million round does not prove that TAVST01 will work in humans, nor does it remove the biological risks that have humbled many solid-tumour programmes before it. But it does give Tikva enough runway to test a clear hypothesis: that a naturally persistent virus-specific T cell, properly engineered, can become a practical off-the-shelf weapon against solid cancers.
If that hypothesis survives clinical testing, the implications would reach well beyond one Singapore startup. It would strengthen Southeast Asia’s claim to a place in high-end therapeutic innovation, not merely as a trial site or manufacturing base, but as a source of globally relevant biotech platforms.
The post Singapore’s Tikva targets solid cancer barrier with US$8M Series A appeared first on e27.
