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Tinkeso Therapeutics
Pioneering novel therapy with natural killer T (NKT) cells
Founded
2016
Employees*
2
Funding to Date*
$1,000,000
Website
tinkeso.com/
* Data source: Crunchbase
Emmie Fan, Co-Founder and CEO of Tinkeso Therapeutics
“The human immune system has a greater ability to fight off cancer and autoimmune diseases than we realize. With natural killer T (NKT) therapies, Tinkeso is harnessing that ability for patients with some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers.”
The global oncology drugs market is expected to grow from $231 billion in 2024 to over $532 billion in 2031, driven by demand for more targeted therapies.

Medical researchers have genetically modified T cells to recognize and attack cancers, but they’ve run into some obstacles. Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) therapies are expensive ($373-475K per treatment), ineffective against solid tumors, potentially neurotoxic, and require gene editing if they’re sourced from healthy donors. That severely limits their potential for commercialization. 

Tinkeso Therapeutics is developing off-the-shelf, allogeneic invariant natural killer T (iNKT) therapies that harness the power of the innate and adaptive immunity to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its CAR-iNKT cells last a long time in freezers and can be used on demand. With its proprietary iNKT cell expansion platform, Tinkeso can generate enough doses for up to 500 patients from one donor leukopak, making the therapy more affordable and scalable than CAR-T alternatives. 

Tinkeso has completed the preclinical development of TINK-101, a therapy for two types of leukemia (T-ALL and AML). In animal studies, TINK-101 doubled the survival time for mice with T-ALL, while 50% of mice with AML were cancer-free one year following treatment. Tinkeso will conduct clinical trials in China in 2025 before pursuing Phase 1/2 trials in the U.S. 

Tinkeso was founded by Jerry Zhou, PhD, MD, former professor at the University of Minnesota and New York Medical College and inventor of two NKT patents. He is joined by co-founder Emmie Fan, MBA, MS, a biotech executive with over 25 years of combined experience in business and R&D at Novartis, Roche, Merck, and AbbVie. With Tinkeso, they are developing novel CAR-iNKT cell therapeutics with the potential to treat a wide range of cancers.