DUBLIN – Bacteriophage, like other viruses, can be viewed as complex molecular machines with two essential functions: infection and replication. The first involves the efficient injection into the host cell of their genomic payload; the second involves hijacking the host’s nucleic acid replication machinery to generate the functional and structural proteins needed to give rise to progeny viruses.

Immvira Group Co. presented positive phase I data for MVR-T3011 as an intratumoral administration (MVR-T3011 IT) at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting this month, drawing attention to oncolytic viruses developed by Chinese scientists.

LONDON – Newco Amyl Therapeutics Ltd. has raised €18.3 million (US$22.3 million) in a series A, to pick up the baton on a technology for neutralizing toxic protein aggregates by binding to their amyloid folds.

Lev Becker spent about six years studying how to release neutrophile elastase from human neutrophils so it could select cancer cell types that need killing and ignore non-cancer cells. That research eventually led to a recent publication in Cell and the launch of Onchilles Pharma Inc.

LONDON – In a sizeable seed round for a U.K. biotech, Transine Therapeutics Ltd. has raised £9.1 million (US$12.9 million) to take forward a novel method for up-regulating endogenous protein production using a naturally occurring class of long noncoding RNAs.

PERTH, Australia – Certa Therapeutics Pty Ltd. founder and CEO Darren Kelly knows a thing or two about launching biotech companies. He spun out Fibrotech Therapeutics in 2006 from the University of Melbourne, which was one of the Medical Research Commercialization Fund’s first investments.

LONDON – In what is claimed as the largest series A for a Danish biotech, Adcendo ApS has raised €51 million (US$61.3 million) to take forward antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) drugs aimed at proprietary targets that are involved in cellular recycling processes.

Stuart Therapeutics Inc., a company developing peptide therapeutics for ophthalmic disease, has completed an $11 million series A financing led by Infocus Capital Partners, an ophthalmology-focused life sciences venture capital fund, with significant participation by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Mimo Capital and Biobrit.

OS Therapies LLC, the developer of a listeria-based cancer vaccine to prevent metastasis and increase overall survival in young people with osteosarcoma, has closed on a $6 million series A financing led by Noble Capital Markets and Tichenor Ventures. The funds will help the company advance its lead candidate, OST-HER2, into a phase IIb trial this year with hopes of a potential FDA filing by in 2022.

In science there are often too many choices to make. Nammi Therapeutics Inc.’s CEO, David Stover, told BioWorld that he makes narrowing therapeutic options a core company principle. The redundancy of immune regulatory pathways in cancer treatments is a case in point.