Corner Therapeutics Inc. raised $54 million in a series A financing to create vaccines to protect against cancer and infectious diseases by helping the immune system engineer T cells. The company’s core interest is in advancements in immunotherapy through direct manipulation of T cells, which are the “keys to the kingdom for any cancer therapy,” Nick Seaver, Corner’s chief business officer, told BioWorld.

YS Biopharma Co. Ltd. has received clinical trial approval by the Philippine Food and Drug Administration to begin a phase I trial of its YS-HBV-002 immunotherapeutic vaccine, designed to treat chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. The trial will begin in the Philippines in June.

Curevac NV and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have entered into a co-development and licensing agreement to develop novel mRNA-based cancer vaccines.

South Korea’s Eubiologics Co. Ltd. said it gained the World Health Organization’s (WHO) prequalification designation on April 16 for its simplified oral cholera vaccine, approved as Euvichol-S.

The FDA has granted orphan drug designation to the active ingredient in Soligenix Inc.’s Marvax, a heat stable subunit protein vaccine of recombinantly expressed Marburg marburgvirus (MARV) glycoprotein, for the prevention and post-exposure prophylaxis against MARV infection.

A research team at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), funded by Cancervax Inc., has created a promising new bispecific antibody vaccine for treating recurrent Ewing sarcoma.

The FDA has granted orphan drug designation to the active ingredient in Soligenix Inc.’s Suvax, a subunit protein vaccine of recombinantly expressed Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV) glycoprotein, for the prevention and post-exposure prophylaxis against SUDV infection. SUDV is a type of ebolavirus for which there is no current treatment or vaccine.

With two respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines approved by the U.S. FDA in 2023 and a third nearing its May PDUFA date, decades of research has finally provided infants and older adults protection from the disruptive and sometimes deadly virus. But what about people in the middle, particularly those with certain chronic medical conditions? New York-based Pfizer Inc. rolled out phase III data April 9 showing that its approved RSV vaccine, Abrysvo (RSVpreF), met primary endpoints in adults ages 18 to 59 who were at high risk of RSV.

“Hot and cold tumors may need different types of immunotherapy,” Jay Berzofsky told the audience as the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) 2024 annual meeting kicked off this weekend.  In an educational session on cancer vaccines, Berzofsky, who is head of the National Cancer Institute’s Molecular Immunogenetics and Vaccine Research section, explained that when immunotherapy fails in hot tumors, it fails despite the existence of an immune response, due to an immunosuppressive microenvironment.