LTZ Therapeutics Inc. has completed a series A financing of more than $20 million to advance the development of its myeloid engager pipeline to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. The closing of this round brings LTZ’s total funding to about $50 million.

The 2024 meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS), which is being held in Munich this week, began with the announcement of another curative bone marrow transplant. The new case brings the total number of patients cured of HIV via a bone marrow transplant up to 7 since “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown became the first such person in 2007.

A research team at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), funded by Cancervax Inc., has created a promising new bispecific antibody vaccine for treating recurrent Ewing sarcoma.

Conformation-X Therapeutics LLC has closed an oversubscribed funding tranche of $3.65 million to support the company’s development of a pipeline of immunotherapies that activate both the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system.

A new method of CAR T-cell immunotherapy developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine could serve as a treatment for most blood cancers. Until now, CAR T-based immunotherapy for hematological malignancies has targeted the antigens CD19 for B cells, CD7 for T cells, BCMA for myeloma, and CD33 for AML.

Hanchorbio Inc. and Shanghai Henlius Biotech Inc. have entered into a strategic framework agreement for collaboration to combine Hanchorbio’s protein engineering expertise and proprietary Fc-based designer biologics (FBDB) technology platform with Henlius’ integrated product development and commercialization capabilities.

Georgiamune Inc. announced that the FDA cleared its IND application for GIM-122, a first-in-class dual-functioning monoclonal antibody designed to target a highly novel mechanism to overcome immunotherapy resistance.

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.

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.