Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is recognized worldwide for its debilitating symptoms of declining cognitive function and gradual memory loss. What remains less clear is exactly what causes the neurodegenerative disease, and how to treat it. “Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by two key pathologies – beta-amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles.” Seung-Yong Yoon, CEO of Adel Inc., told BioWorld. “Adel is looking to develop a tau-targeting drug, considering tau has been more correlated with AD symptom progression, and the industry’s need for tau pipelines.”

Nearly a year after Prometheus Biosciences Inc. sold for $10.8 billion to Merck & Co. Inc., its former CEO, Mark McKenna, is back in the game with Mirador Therapeutics Inc. Many of his former Prometheus colleagues have joined McKenna. Getting the band back together, McKenna told BioWorld, “is the ultimate compliment.” Mirador just launched with more than $400 million to develop therapies for treating immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases.

Triarm Therapeutics Ltd. is on a mission to democratize CAR T therapies to make them more accessible and affordable, Triarm CEO Jay Zhang told BioWorld. “Nearly half of the patients eligible for CAR T therapies still cannot get treated, and the main reason is the expense, and the second is they cannot afford to wait.

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.

Seven years since the first approval of two chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies for hematological cancers, U.S. and Singapore-based Immunoscape Pte Ltd. is looking to develop novel T-cell receptor (TCR) therapeutics for solid tumors.

A new spinout from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is tackling biology to better understand immune cell function and to find targets that were thought to be undruggable.

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.

Hun-taek Kim founded Tiumbio Co. Ltd. in 2016 after spending more than two decades at a major chemical and life science firm, SK Chemicals Co. Ltd. “The prospects for our three major assets are very bright, and the probability of failure is low,” CEO Kim told BioWorld. “We’re looking for a breakthrough in rare diseases – to develop new treatments for [niche] markets with large unmet demand.”

Vision Care Group CEO Masayo Takahashi led the world's first clinical study of a retinal cell transplant derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in 2014 when she led the Laboratory for Retinal Regeneration at Japan’s Riken Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. In 2019, she founded Vision Care and subsequently founded two subsidiary companies dedicated to developing cell and gene therapies.