Precision medicine startup Solu Therapeutics has raised $31 million in an oversubscribed seed round to advance a therapeutic candidate based on technology that identifies cell surface, tumor-associated targets that antibodies alone fail to latch onto. The company was founded by venture capital firm Longwood Fund and has high hopes for its cytotoxicity targeting chimera platform. “[It] has the potential to unlock new tumor-associated antigens and develop molecules that deplete pathogenic immune cells and extend the half-life of small-molecule antagonists and agonists,” CEO and co-founder of Solu, David Donabedian, told BioWorld.

Newco Renaissance Pharma Ltd. has been formed to take a new treatment for neuroblastoma developed at St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital through to market. The product, Hu14.18, has been in-licensed following a phase II trial conducted at the hospital in which patients with newly diagnosed high-risk neuroblastoma had a three-year event-free survival of 73.7% and an overall survival of 86%.

The radiopharmaceuticals field is gaining traction as companies realize that by harnessing the power of radioactive atoms, they can create targeted and more effective cancer drugs which cause less damage to healthy tissues. As a result, competition for a place as a leading radiopharma firm is high, and the market is estimated to reach $11.5 billion by 2027.

Viage Therapeutics Inc. – formerly Digestome Therapeutics Inc. – on July 26 unveiled positive data from its phase I study on DGX-001 for mild cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s (PD). The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study demonstrated changes in brain activity according to quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) measurements in 68 healthy volunteers dosed with single ascending and multiple ascending doses.

The identification of new targets in diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s – conditions which continue to have significant unmet needs – has taken a small step forward as one company, Violet Therapeutics Inc., plans to put $10.6 million in seed funding toward building out a pipeline based on technologies that elucidate the way cells interact amongst one another.

Newco Glycocore Pharma Srl is setting out to raise €10 million (US$11.2 million) in a series A round to take a novel approach to treating inflammatory respiratory diseases into the clinic, starting with a phase I/Ib trial in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

EG 427 SAS has added a further a further €5 million (US$5.6 million) to its series A, closing the round at €18 million and setting the stage for the first clinical trial of a gene therapy in the treatment of a chronic disorder.

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.