BEIJING – After his role as associate director and head of chemistry at Eli Lilly and Co., Brandeis-trained Jingye Zhou founded Eccogene Inc. in Shanghai in 2018 to focus on developing small-molecule drugs for metabolism and immune-related diseases.

BEIJING – After being a health care investor for 21 years, Jonathan Wang decided to co-found biotech startup Inmagene Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. in July 2019 to seek success in the China market using the experience and insights he had accumulated over the years. With $20 million in its war chest so far, the startup aims to excel in immunology-related therapeutic areas in China.

Fountain Therapeutics Inc., a California company working to create treatments for age-related diseases, said Khosla Ventures has led a $6 million series A-1 financing of the startup, with participation from Nan Fung Life Sciences, which earlier contributed $5 million to the round.

LONDON – After announcing its $17.4 million series A funding in the midst of pandemic in April, Genespire Srl has now gone public on the preclinical research upon which its programs will be based, presenting the data at last week’s American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) annual meeting.

CEO and co-founder Rosana Kapeller told BioWorld that Rome Therapeutics Inc.’s $50 million series A will fund early work in an “exploding” new area of biology: the repeatome – “the dark genome” or “junk DNA,” as many previously deemed the roughly 60% of the human genome that consists of repetitive sequences of nucleic acids.

I2O Therapeutics Inc., of Allston, Mass., raised $4 million in seed funding to further its work on oral formulations of therapies typically limited to injections, such as biologics, large molecules and peptide-based pharmaceuticals.

LONDON – Amphista Ltd. becomes the latest to join the growing band of proteolysis targeting chimera (Protac) specialists, arriving on the scene with a $7.5 million series A and what it says is a new approach to targeted protein degradation (TPD).

LONDON – A founding father of anti-angiogenesis therapy, Peter Carmeliet is turning his previous work on its head in new research which indicates that rather than destroying tumor vasculature, it should be piggy-backed as a means to recruit immune cells to a tumor.

Nineteengale Therapeutics is a new joint venture that was launched to fill a large void. Cyclica Inc., along with its partner, Neurotheryx Canada Ltd., both of Toronto, created Nineteengale to find and develop cannabinoid-inspired drugs for bipolar disorder, anxiety and pain management.

Lessons learned from development of hepatitis C therapies could be applied to the underserved hepatitis B population, potentially leading to a functional cure through a combination of optimized drugs that attack the virus from different angles. That is the mission of 2-year-old Aligos Therapeutics Inc., a South San Francisco-based startup focused on liver-related diseases.