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From three companies to one — Galvanize Therapeutics gets $100M to push electric field therapy

2022-09-15

ATP (formerly Apple Tree Partners) was once home to three electric field therapy companies. Now, it’s home to only one — which is forging forward with a $100 million Series B.

Gala Therapeutics, Galaxy Medical, and Galvanize Therapeutics have merged under the umbrella of Galvanize Therapeutics. The newly merged company will be working to develop electric field therapy in the same three areas that the three old companies worked on separately, but now under one platform called Aliya.

The three areas? Chronic bronchitis symptoms, cardiac arrhythmias and solid tumors.

Galvanize CEO and ATP partner Jon Waldstreicher told Endpoints News that the core of the three programs from the separate companies was already very similar before. “Ninety-five percent of it was the same — and we leveraged [the technology] very quickly to move into some of these other therapeutic targets as well,” he said.

Electric field therapy comes as a box that is installed in hospitals. That box contains a generator and is connected to a cable which then runs to the patients via some delivery mechanism — be it a needle, electrode, or catheter. The electric output of the therapy can be controlled by knobs on the box, “a blessing and a curse,” Waldstreicher said. “It’s a blessing because you can always adjust the knobs, but it’s a curse because you can always adjust the knobs as to how to deliver [the therapy] too.”

For each indication though, Waldstreicher said, the therapy is applied in a different way. For chronic bronchitis, the electric field therapy is meant to kill abnormal mucus-producing cells, but for cardiac arrhythmias, the therapy is meant to disrupt irregular electric signals to the heart.

The new infusion of money will be used for a number of goals, Waldstreicher said. In the immediate future, Galvanize will focus on the launch of three therapies — two in Europe, for chronic bronchitis and cardiac arrhythmias, and one in the US for soft tissue ablation.

Part of the money will also go toward funding clinical trials Galvanize is already running to expand the indications its electric therapy can treat. Waldstreicher highlighted that one area the newly merged biotech will be going after is cancer.

“I think that this is one of the areas where our background on the ATP side relating to biotech encourages us to really go a step beyond just a medical device company,” Waldstreicher said.

In preclinical studies, researchers found that targeting cells with their therapy caused them to release a lot of tumor neoantigens — so Waldstreicher believes that combining the electric field therapy with immune checkpoint therapy could increase their therapeutic effect.

Galvanize is currently running a trial in lung cancer patients, giving them the electric field therapy in the same visit as their index biopsy, once they determine they have a malignant tumor. “And this was mostly a safety study there, but demonstrating that we could do that to be additive on top of all the surgery, radiation, chemo, and other targeted therapies there is really important,” Waldstreicher said.

While its past efforts have been funded in full by ATP, the venture firm was joined by a suite of other investors for the Series B, with Fidelity Management and Research Company leading the way, and Intuitive and Gilmartin Capital participating as well.

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