Cartography emerged from stealth in July 2022 with $57 million in initial financing to create more precise immunotherapies.
Immunotherapy is a promising treatment for many forms of cancer, but reaching its full potential will require better targets. This was the challenge Kevin Parker, Ph.D, the company’s CEO and co-founder, set out to solve. Alongside his co-founders, Stanford University professors Drs. Ansu Satpathy and Howard Chang, the team launched Cartography Biosciences to create a smarter roadmap for precision cancer therapeutics and create therapeutics that will widen the world of treatable cancers.
By bringing together immunology and computation, Cartography is uncovering antigen targets for hard to treat cancers and developing therapeutics across a range of modalities. Following seed and Series A financing rounds totaling $57 million from investors including 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, and Wing VC, Cartography made its formal debut in July 2022. The Cartography team is using these funds to expand its team, drive existing programs forward, and invest in continued development of its platform, which combines computational and experimental techniques to create profiles of antigens found on both normal and cancerous cells.
Nearly everyone knows someone whose life has been irrevocably changed following a cancer diagnosis. Cartography is dedicated to finding druggable targets for the cancers whose disease we can’t currently treat and creating therapeutics across a range of modalities that are specific enough to only engage tumor cells, broad enough to target every cell in a patient’s tumor, and safe enough to minimize toxic side effects.
Cartography joined MBC BioLabs’ second San Carlos campus in late 2020, when the company was first getting up and running. The Cartography team, which spent about a year at MBC’s Brittan Avenue site, was a valued member of our ecosystem of growing Bay Area biotech companies.
With Cartography’s successful launch, we look forward to following its continued scientific advances and progress closely as the company shapes a world in which cancer immunotherapies are directed toward the safest and more effective targets.