Bloomsbury Genetic Therapies Ltd. has raised £5 million (US$5.5 million) in a seed round, to take four gene therapy programs based on research carried out by the scientific founders at University College London into clinical development.

Stratosvir Ltd. aims to overcome the drawbacks experienced with oncolytic viruses, using technology based around vaccinia viruses that allow for a systemic injection and with a larger payload capacity. Stratosvir was started up by CEO Chris Ullman and co-founder Antonio Postigo in 2020 with funding from Cancer Research UK and the Deep Science Ventures, tasked with finding new ways of treating solid tumors.

Startup Avelos Therapeutics Inc. raised $8 million in series A funding that will launch the company’s biomarker-driven cancer therapy pipeline using its synthetic lethality platform. Participating in the series A funding were SV Investment, UTC Investment, Quad Investment Management, Timepolio Asset Management, Mirae Asset Venture Investment and Mirae Asset Capital.

E-nitiate Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. has raised ¥100 million (US$14.4 million) in a series A round to speed up the clinical trials of its lead assets, QY-201 and QY-101, and expand the pipeline. “Our strategy is to focus on the ‘blue ocean’ of the dermatosis market,” said Shi Jun, chief medical officer at E-nitiate Biopharma. “The first step is to enter China’s autoimmune skin diseases market.”

Over the past decade cancer immunotherapy has redefined standard care in many kinds of tumor, but low response rates remain a problem and there have been some shock trial failures where checkpoint inhibitors have failed to work as expected. To help, Neobe Therapeutics Ltd. is attempting to tackle an important constituent of the tumor microenvironment, the extracellular matrix.

Nodus Oncology Ltd. is set to explore new avenues of DNA damage response by targeting the chromosome next-door neighbors of tumor suppressor genes that are damaged when tumor suppressor genes are inactivated via homozygous deletion. These collaterally deleted ‘passenger genes’ play diverse functions in cell homeostasis and so present a number of molecularly targeted vulnerabilities that can provide a route to destroying cells which carry a tumor suppressor gene.

Gate Neurosciences Inc. was first founded in 2019, but officially launched last week with two clinical-stage assets and a bold goal: to develop better drugs for CNS disorders and identify better-suited patients for those drugs. The company’s first molecular target is the NMDA receptor. Gate has acquired the rights to two NMDA receptor modulators, zelquistinel and apimostinel.

Having initiated its first two clinical trials in non-small-cell lung cancer since January, Nuvalent Inc. said it expects to unveil preliminary dose-escalation data before year-end. Ahead of the data, Nuvalent's phase I/II Arros-1 trial evaluating NVL-520, a kinase inhibitor, in patients with advanced ROS1-positive NSCLC and other solid tumors, continues to enroll participants.

Nuvectis Pharma Inc. has been in business for barely two years, but thanks to a business model involving in-licensing promising late preclinical drug candidates, it has already begun a trial with a molecule targeting a little-known pathway that cancer cells depend on for protection. The firm is also close to the clinic with a drug that could give a new twist to tyrosine kinase inhibition after a $16 million financing round in early August.

Alterity Therapeutics Ltd. has begun phase II trials with its lead candidate, ATH-434, in multiple system atrophy, a rare and highly debilitating Parkinsonian disorder.