A South San Francisco biotech company has started dosing cancer patients with an experimental therapy designed to hunt down kidney tumors while sparing healthy tissue, and it just landed an extra $30 million to keep the work going. Link Cell Therapies said clinical dosing has begun for its lead program, LNK001, a logic-gated CAR-T therapy aimed at advanced or metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer.
Dosing Begins at Houston Cancer Center
According to a release from PR Newswire, LNK001 began clinical dosing at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, as part of a Phase 1 study. The therapy targets two proteins, CAIX and ENPP3, using what the company calls an AND-gated approach, meaning the engineered immune cells are designed to require co-expression of both markers before activating against a tumor cell. The therapy is manufactured at CTMC, a joint venture between Resilience and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, per the same release.
Link Cell Therapies had previously described its underlying technology in similar terms when it launched from stealth in December 2025. The company's own site explained that its Link-based CAR is engineered to activate and kill target cells only when a combination of antigens is co-localized on the tumor, according to Link Cell Therapies. That earlier statement also said LNK001 targets two antigens uniquely and highly co-expressed in most renal cell carcinoma tumors, and that the program was on track for an IND filing and Phase 1 dosing sometime in 2026.
Executive Team Grows as Funding Doubles
Alongside the dosing news, the company announced three additions to its executive leadership. Jie D'Elia, Ph.D., joined as chief executive officer and a board member; he previously served as CEO of SystImmune, Inc., spent eleven years at Bristol Myers Squibb, and led more than $40 billion in strategic partnerships and acquisitions, per the PR Newswire release. Friedrich Graf Finckenstein, M.D., joined as chief medical officer after previously serving in that same role at Iovance Biotherapeutics — the company behind Amtagvi, which the release notes was approved as the first cell therapy for a solid tumor. Brian Slingerland, who co-founded Link Cell Therapies alongside Robbie Majzner and Crystal Mackall in 2022, became executive chair.
The company also confirmed it had upsized its Series A financing from $60 million to $90 million, an increase of $30 million. Johnson & Johnson Innovation–JJDC led the original Series A when Link Cell Therapies launched from stealth in December 2025, per the company's own announcement, with Samsara BioCapital and Sheatree Capital also participating in the round. The company said the additional capital will support clinical and preclinical development of additional logic-gated CAR-T programs.
Founders With Stanford Roots and AbbVie Ties
Link Cell Therapies was founded at Stanford University in 2022 by Robbie Majzner, Crystal Mackall, Brian Slingerland and Samsara BioCapital, and the company is based in South San Francisco, according to its own materials. The release also notes that AbbVie acquired StemCentrx for $6.2 billion in 2016, a reference point the company draws on in describing the pedigree behind its solid-tumor ambitions.
Majzner said the company's vision is to translate breakthrough science into therapies that make a profound difference for people impacted by cancer, according to the release. Abraham Bassan said the leadership team has broad experience and is positioned to develop impactful medicines. D'Elia said he believes Link's logic-gate platform can make CAR-T broadly viable in solid tumors, a goal that remains unproven in the clinic but reflects the company's stated ambitions for the technology.
Part of a Broader Push Into Solid Tumors
Link Cell Therapies is not alone in trying to adapt CAR-T therapy, which has mostly succeeded against blood cancers, to solid tumors like kidney, colorectal and lung cancer. A comparable effort from A2 Biotherapeutics, A2B395, is an allogeneic logic-gated Tmod CAR-T product being tested in a Phase 1/2 study covering colorectal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, triple-negative breast cancer, renal cell carcinoma and other solid tumors, according to a UCLA clinical-trial listing. That trial, sponsored by A2 Biotherapeutics, started in May 2025 and lists an estimated completion date of March 2030, with UCLA Medical Center accepting new patients.
The broader industry is also moving in this direction. The first quarter of 2026 saw fewer regulatory approvals but more regulatory de-risking across the gene, cell and RNA therapy landscape, according to the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, which reported an uptick in advanced molecular therapy dealmaking. ASGCT's Q2 2026 takeaways said dealmaking and early-stage investment reached their strongest levels in the past year. Separately, AstraZeneca has discussed the early promise of cell therapies in solid tumors and research into ways to help such therapies resist immunosuppressive signals in the tumor microenvironment.
What Comes Next
Link Cell Therapies has also outlined plans beyond kidney cancer. The company previously said it aims to select a development candidate for colorectal cancer in 2026 and begin a first-in-human trial for that program in 2027, according to its own announcement. For now, the company's public disclosures do not include patient-level safety, efficacy or response data from the newly begun LNK001 dosing, nor details on the full scope of its expanded executive team beyond the three appointments named in the release.
