FLX Bio, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of oral small-molecule drugs to activate the immune system against cancer, today announced the completion of a $60 million Series C private financing. The financing included new investments from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and other undisclosed investors as well as existing investors including The Column Group, Kleiner Perkins, Topspin Partners and Celgene Corporation.
Kyn is led by an Atlas entrepreneur-in-residence Mark Manfredi, who was previously chief scientific officer at Raze Therapeutics (also an Atlas-funded startup). Raze raised a $24 million Series A in 2014, but the company appears to have wound down pretty quickly. The website is no longer active, and Manfredi said Raze still has some assets and collaborations, but no longer employs anyone. Atlas’ Bruce Booth says the underlying cancer metabolism biology was too complicated to warrant further investment. Before Raze, Manfredi was VP of oncology biology at Takeda.
A new report has found that there are more than 2,000 immunotherapy drugs now in development for cancer, with 940 of these in clinical stage development and 1,064 at the preclinical stage.
Neon Therapeutics, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company developing neoantigen therapies, today announced the successful completion of an additional $36 million extension to its Series B financing which, combined with $70 million announced in January 2017, brings the total raised during this Series B crossover round to $106 million.
Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have identified another cancer-surface molecule, CD22, and begun trials on B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients using an immuno-oncology approach similar to CAR-T. In the Phase I trial, 15 of the 21 patients who had previously relapsed or did not respond to anti-CD19 CAR-T, were treated with an anti-CD22 CAR-T therapy. Ten of the 15 patients had already received treatment for CD19-targeted treatment.
As NousCom CEO Alfredo Nicosia likes to say, the Basel-based biotech is a relative fledgling at 2-years of age. But the core research team there has been working together for quite a few years.
A venture capital firm in the Netherlands — backed by some big names in Big Pharma — has raised $95 million in a new fund to fuel European biotech startups.
AbbVie (ABBV), a global biopharmaceutical company, and Alector, a privately owned biotechnology company, announced a global strategic collaboration to develop and commercialize medicines to treat Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
Eli Lilly and Company (LLY) and CureVac AG have announced a global immuno-oncology collaboration focused on the development and commercialization of up to five potential cancer vaccine products based on CureVac's proprietary RNActive® technology. The companies will use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that targets tumor neoantigens for a more robust anti-cancer immune response.
Just a few months after Merck’s monster May for Keytruda, which featured three FDA approvals, the New Jersey drugmaker is back with another green light.
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