Cellerant Therapeutics, Inc, of San Carlos, California, a developer of treatments for autoimmune diseases, genetic blood disorders, and neutropenia, has announced that it has raised a total of $25 million in its Series B round of financing. New investors include Amgen founder George Rathmann. The company plans to initiate clinical trials in 2006 for its two lead products, CLT-001 for autoimmune diseases and genetic blood disorders and CLT-008 for neutropenia.

Cellerant's CLT-001 cell purification platform for the cGMP production of stem cell grafts yields highly purified hematopoietic stem cell (CD34+CD90+) populations derived from mobilized peripheral blood. Lacking T-cell contamination, these purified stem cells do not cause graft-versus-host-disease following allogeneic transplant and thus may lead to curative allogeneic transplantation for the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as lupus, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. CLT-001 grafts should be more tolerant of HLA mismatch than transplants that include donor T cells. In animal models of autoimmune disease, Cellerant's CLT-001 allogeneic transplantation has resulted in a durable mixed chimerism wherein the tolerance mechanism halted autoimmune disease.