Tenpoint Therapeutics Ltd. raised $70 million in a series A funding round to pursue ambitious plans to reverse vision loss using both ex vivo cell engineering and in vivo cell reprogramming approaches.

Most drug developers working in the immunotherapy space focus on existing therapeutic targets when developing cancer drugs, optimizing ways of drugging them via engineering modalities such as CAR T-cell approaches, CRISPR editing or antibody-drug conjugates that deliver toxic payloads. The angle of one company – Cartography Biosciences – is the opposite to this. Its modus operandi is to pinpoint the immunological targets first, leveraging tools that already exist, before building therapies around them.

IPSirius SAS, an early stage French immuno-oncology firm, hopes to obtain a clinical trial authorization from the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Products Agency next year, to enable it to move its novel therapeutic cancer vaccine into a first-in-human trial in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

Many of the available treatments for the autoimmune conditions ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease come with drawbacks such as safety issues or inconvenient dosing regimens. Describing itself as a biomarker-driven immunoregulatory therapeutics company, Nimmune Biopharma Inc. is striving to fulfil what it perceives as a high need for safer, more effective options with candidates that target the lanthionine synthetase C-like 2 (LANCL2) pathway.

Empress Therapeutics Inc., a Flagship Pioneering firm, has come out of stealth with $50 million in initial funding, a new chief scientific officer and an ambitious plan to file multiple INDs for novel small-molecule compounds over the next two years.

Could a bioactive peptide secreted in the saliva of ticks offer a useful therapy for people who have experienced intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH)? That’s the question Bioxodes SA has set out to answer, and the company is about to move its first-in-class drug candidate, Ir-CPI, which has dual anti-thrombotic and anti-inflammatory effects, into a phase IIa trial in patients with ICH.

After raising AU$4 million (US$2.6 million), Argenica Therapeutics Pty. Ltd. is gearing up to begin phase II trials in ischemic stroke for ARG-007, a glutamate receptor modulator that is believed to reduce brain tissue death after stroke.

The U.S. FDA greenlighted Highfield Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd.’s IND, paving way for the Chinese immunotherapy firm to begin clinical testing its immunoliposome cancer therapy.

Itabmed Ltd. received an IND approval to start a phase I trial of its CD3-activating bispecific antibody A-337 for the treatment of patients with advanced solid tumors.

Seeking to repurpose a validated oncology drug target for atherosclerosis is Bitterroot Bio Inc., a biotech company that introduced itself to the world on the back of a sizable $145 million series A, funds it intends to use to advance its lead monoclonal antibody, BRB-002, toward the clinic.