Vaginal microbiome specialist Freya Bioscience ApS has added $11.8 million to its series A, bringing the total for the round to $50 million. Of the additional $11.8 million, $10.4 million comes from the Gates Foundation and is designated for the development of vaginal microbiome-based immunotherapies for treating bacterial vaginosis, a cause of preterm birth and other pregnancy complications.

Gene therapy faces complexities in delivering treatments due to persistent safety concerns and daunting immune responses, but Next Generation Gene Therapeutics Inc. has found a way around this issue using dual-functional vectors to simultaneously remove harmful, mutated genes and replace them with normal, healthy genes to restore cellular function.

Hope Medicine Inc. reported positive interim results for monoclonal antibody HMI-115 in a phase II endometriosis trial that saw the mean non-menstrual pelvic pain score reduced by 50%. “HMI-115 is a prolactin receptor blocker, and we're using it to treat endometriosis and some other diseases. It is a first-in-class new mechanism to treat endometriosis,” Hope Medicine CEO Nathan Chen told BioWorld.

Seaport Therapeutics Inc. has followed up its recent fundraiser with an oversubscribed $225 million series B financing that will help set it on the path to a phase IIb study in major depressive disorder. The company’s lead candidate is allopregnanolone, an endogenous neurosteroid that is taken orally and bypasses the liver. Once it is absorbed through the lymphatic system, allopregnanolone enters through a pathway that avoids the liver and the possibility of hepatoxicity and elevated liver enzyme counts, Michael Chen, Seaport’s chief scientific officer, told BioWorld.

The founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. is now leading the charge with newly launched City Therapeutics Inc., which just completed a $135 million series A financing. City’s executive chair, John Maraganore, will be in familiar territory as the new company plans to develop RNAi-based medicines using next-generation siRNA engineering. He expects dozens of these therapies to reach the market in a relatively short period of time, not just from City Therapeutics but from other companies. It’s a period in the development timeline that he finds reminiscent of the rise and development of monoclonal antibodies.

Booster Therapeutics is ready to open up a new arm of the proteasome after raising $15 million in seed funding to advance small molecules it says can degrade multiple types of harmful proteins. Rather than tagging single disease proteins with a ubiquitin marker for degrading via 26S proteasomes, these compounds directly activate 20S proteasomes that naturally recognize disordered proteins without the need for ubiquitin tagging.

Judo Bio Inc. emerged from stealth mode and rolled out data showing the value of using megalin receptors for intracellular delivery of ligand-small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapeutics to the kidney as a way of reducing expression of the targeted genes.

In one of the top series A financings in biopharma history, new company Kailera Therapeutics Inc. emerged with $400 million raised and a pipeline of next-generation assets to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A drive to overcome the limitations of traditional antibodies led Toronto-based scientists Jean-Philippe Julien and Bebhinn Treanor to work toward discovering a multivalent, multispecific platform to develop therapies that can reach difficult targets. As a result, through the support of VC firm Amplitude Ventures, Radiant Biotherapeutics emerged in 2020 armed with what has become its Multabody platform.

Candid Therapeutics Inc. launched with ex-China control of two bispecific T-cell engager antibodies that it plans to develop for autoimmune diseases. The San Diego-based company will start off with a pocketful of cash, having raised over $370 million for the development of the in-licensed candidates.