On the heels of a $4.6 million series A round in December 2023, cell therapy company Rxcell Inc. is planning to raise another $15 million in 2024 to take its iPSC-derived photoreceptors to the clinic for retinitis pigmentosa and other degenerative diseases of the retina.
Medicxi has made its first ever investment in China – and its biggest single commitment to date – putting $40 million into D3 Bio Inc. The investment by the London-based venture capital firm will accelerate development of D3’s lead program D3S-001, a second generation KRAS G12C inhibitor, which is in phase II development in advanced solid tumors.
With a $128 million series A financing, Diagonal Therapeutics Inc. launched to develop its lead program using agonist antibodies for treating, among other indications, the rare disease hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia. The antibodies are designed to activate a receptor complex in the TGF-β superfamily genetically impaired in patients with the bleeding disorder. Diagonal also is developing a treatment for the orphan disease pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Addex Therapeutics has offloaded its portfolio of preclinical allosteric modulation drugs into Neurosterix, a new company that arrives on the scene with a $63 million series A round.
One of the building blocks for newly launched Clasp Therapeutics Corp. is making the right patient choices for treatment. If those who receive the company’s therapy are correctly identified, CEO Robert Ross told BioWorld, it will have a profound effect on outcomes. The missing link in cancer treatment, Ross added, was how to identify a patient, something he said Clasp is able to do.
Asgard Therapeutics AB has raised €30 million (US$32.8 million) in a series A round to advance a novel approach to cancer immunotherapy, in which it is proposed to reprogram cancer cells into functional antigen-presenting dendritic cells in vivo, activating a host immune response against the tumor.
San Diego-based Kenai Therapeutics Inc. raised $82 million in a series A round to move its disease-modifying cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease into the clinic. The company, which leverages induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, will advance its next-generation allogeneic neuron replacement cell therapies for neurological diseases, specifically completing a clinical proof-of-concept trial for its lead candidate, RNDP-001.
Curve Therapeutics Ltd. has raised £40.5 million (US$51.2 million) in a series A round to take two lead programs toward the clinic over the next three years. Since its formation in 2019, Curve has applied its Microcycle intracellular screening platform to discover a pipeline of small molecules against oncology targets that have evaded conventional approaches.
Baseimmune Ltd. has raised $11.3 million through a series A to accelerate the development of its deep learning AI technology for predicting future pathogen mutations to generate a series of longer-lasting, multistrain vaccines.
Raising $94 million in a series A round, South San Francisco-based Firefly Bio Inc. has emerged from stealth to advance its Firelink linker platform technology to develop degrader-antibody conjugates (DACs) to treat cancer. A combination of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and targeted protein degradation therapies, DACs are a new class of medicines that have recently gained attention for their ability to replace toxic ADC payloads and to eliminate cancer-driven proteins.