PERTH, Australia – Patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (r/r AML) who have received three or more lines of therapy are often too sick to get much-needed bone marrow transplants and often run out of options. Melbourne-based Race Oncology Ltd. hopes to change those outcomes with a new take on an old drug that slipped through the cracks in the 1980s.

Adopting a new strategy in food allergies and others, South San Francisco-based Iggenix Inc. launched with a $10 million series A round to fund work that CEO Bruce Hironaka told BioWorld puts the company “at the front of the wave.” Companies in the allergy space generally “have not taken full advantages of the developments that we’ve seen in the biotech industry over the last 20 or 30 years,” he said.

CAPS Medical, of Netanya, Israel, closed a $3.5 million series A round led by Chasing Value Asset Management and the Los Angeles-based Israel Investment Fund Group. The new funds will be used to enable CAPS to undertake its first clinical trial for its minimally invasive, nonthermal plasma device for cancer treatment and further develop its portfolio for the treatment of solid tumors.

PERTH, Australia – Startup Inventia Life Science Pty. Ltd. has received two major investments from the Australian government to accelerate the development of a robotic device that prints a patient’s own skin cells directly onto a burn or wound. Named Ligō from the Latin “to bind,” the device could revolutionize the way surgeons approach wound repair.

HONG KONG – Daejeon, South Korea-based biotechnology company G2GBIO Inc. has raised ₩11.4 billion (US$9.53 million) from a series B financing round, with the funds to be used on clinical trials for a sustained-release Alzheimer’s treatment as well as nonclinical trials for diabetes and sustained-release postoperative pain treatments.

By deleting the gene for uridine monophosphate synthetase (UMPS), an enzyme in the pathway for uridine synthesis, researchers have made cells, including embryonic stem cells and T cells, dependent on dietary uridine. The work, which was published in the July 13, 2020, online issue of Nature Biotechnology, adds a new potential way of controlling cell therapies.

HONG KONG – Daejeon, South Korea-based biotechnology company G2GBIO Inc. has raised ₩11.4 billion (US$9.53 million) from a series B financing round, with the funds to be used on clinical trials for a sustained-release Alzheimer’s treatment as well as nonclinical trials for diabetes and sustained-release postoperative pain treatments.

The first bispecific antibody to win regulatory approval, Removab (catumaxomab) was voluntarily withdrawn due to commercial reasons. Now Chinese biotech Lintonpharm Co. Ltd., of Guangzhou, said it plans to move catumaxomab to a global phase III trial following an IND approval from China’s NMPA, investigating the trifunctional bispecific antibody in patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis, a form of advanced gastric cancer.