MEDICAL ALLEY, Minnesota (September 9th, 2025) – LEAH Labs, a translational medicine company building designer cell therapies for pets first, and their people next, has been awarded a highly competitive, $400,000 National Cancer Institute Small Business Innovation Research Technology Transfer (SBIR-TT) Phase I grant award (1R43CA295178-01A1). The SBIR-TT program was authorized through a Notice of Special Interest with the intent to move commercially viable technologies from the NIH Intramural Program to the marketplace. LEAH Labs was the only company to be awarded an SBIR-TT through the 3-year program window. Through this SBIR-TT grant, LEAH Labs is granted a non-exclusive patent license agreement for internal research use to NIH patent US11098283B2 titled “T cells modified to overexpress c-Myb”.
LEAH Labs’ founding mission was to build designer cell therapies for dogs with cancer and is the first and only group in the world to induce remissions in pet dogs with CAR-T cell therapy. LEAH Labs is working to develop novel therapies for pets with analogous cancers in humans and eventually translate these discoveries from veterinary medicine. Winning this proposal and a license to NIH intellectual property allows LEAH Labs to accelerate pre-clinical R&D towards the latter mission, targeting key unmet needs in the broader applications of human CAR-T cell therapies.
In preliminary experiments used to demonstrate proof of concept for this technology’s application to human CAR-T cells, LEAH Labs showed that c-Myb overexpression markedly reduces CAR-T cell differentiation and exhaustion, thus confirming its key role as survival and persistence factor in the context of human CAR-T therapy. This NCI SBIR-TT Phase I funding allows LEAH Labs to further evaluate the overexpression of c-Myb in multiple CAR-T cell therapy contexts to demonstrate enhanced CAR-T function under exhausting conditions, including chronic antigen stimulation in 3D solid tumor models.
LEAH Labs’ founder and CEO, Dr. Wes Wierson, added, “There are a plethora of hurdles limiting CAR-T cell therapy’s effective translation to solid tumors. Combining our expertise in precision gene editing with patented NIH technology gives LEAH Labs the chance to address CAR-T cell exhaustion on the road to building uplifted cancer cell therapies for pets and people.”
This NIH SBIR-TT award brings LEAH Labs’ total grant funding to over $3.1M. All prior awards have met their milestones, increasing the value of LEAH Labs’ proprietary platform technologies, derisking the technical hurdles towards commercialization, and allowing LEAH Labs to hire and employ PhD-level research scientists in the Minnesota Bioeconomy.
“We are grateful to the federal government and American taxpayers for supporting innovation and startups like ours through the SBIR program.” said Dr. Wierson.
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About LEAH Labs
LEAH Labs is building living therapies for pets first, and their people next. We’re first focused on bringing to market Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cell therapy to disrupt the current treatment paradigm for dogs with B cell lymphoma, the clinical analog of CAR-T curable non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans. Underpinning LEAH Labs’ ability to bring CAR-T to dogs is a patented, virus-free gene integration technology, GeneWeld. Leveraging our core technology, an unmet need for improved canine cancer therapies, a favorable regulatory environment under the USDA-CVB, a network of innovative veterinary oncologists, and pet owners eager for the best possible care, LEAH Labs is uniquely positioned to rapidly iterate and innovate on CAR-T cell therapy in natural cancers like no one else in the world. This approach allows for a 1,000x reduction in CAR-T cell therapy development and clinical trial costs when compared to FDA-regulated cell therapies in human patients and will ultimately lead to rapid identification of better therapies that impact both ends of the leash.
NIH footnote
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43CA295178. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
