Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #20
ALSO: Mapping Pharma Innovation, Foundation Model for Radiology, Injectable Immune Organs vs. Ovarian Cancer, and More...
Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, ‘Where Tech Meets Bio,’ where we talk about technologies, breakthroughs, and great companies moving the biopharma and medtech industries forward.
If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If that is the case, subscribe by clicking this button:
Let’s get to this week’s topics!
Brief Insights
💰 Novo Holdings leads a $135M Series B funding round for Adcendo, a Copenhagen-based biotech advancing antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) targeting cancers with high unmet needs, including sarcomas and aggressive epithelial tumors.
💰 Raidium raises €16M in seed funding to develop an AI foundation model for radiology, with plans to expand to the U.S. and seek regulatory approval.
💰 Roche acquires Poseida Therapeutics for up to $1.5B, expanding its cell therapy portfolio with Poseida's non-viral, allogeneic CAR-T therapies for cancers and autoimmune diseases, leveraging T stem cell memory platforms.
💰 Cradle raises $73M in Series B to expand its generative AI protein engineering platform, accelerating protein development timelines by up to 12x and advancing applications in pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and sustainable chemicals.
🚀 Jimini Health, a Stanford-based mental health startup, launches with $8M in seed funding to develop AI-supported hybrid therapy combining licensed clinicians with its AI assistant, Sage, to provide continuous, personalized care and improve therapy outcomes.
🔬 Insilico Medicine secures FDA IND clearance for ISM5939, its 10th AI-designed drug candidate targeting ENPP1 to enhance anti-tumor immunity in solid tumors, developed using its AI platform Chemistry42 in just three months.
🔬 The Wyss Institute’s iNodes team secures an ARPA-H award to develop injectable immune organs for ovarian cancer, transforming cold tumors into hot tumors to enhance anti-tumor immunity, with potential for cost-effective, personalized treatment.
🔬 Axsome Therapeutics reports positive Phase 3 results for reboxetine, showing significant reductions in cataplexy attacks, improved daytime sleepiness, and sustained cognitive benefits in narcolepsy patients, paving the way for an FDA submission.
🔬 Japanese researchers identify MICOS10 gene variants as a novel cause of hepatocerebral mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, shedding light on mitochondrial dysfunction and opening avenues for improved genetic diagnostics and targeted treatments.
🔬 Brainomix wins LSX European Lifestars “Healthtech Company of the Year” and OBN’s “Most Transformative Healthtech Company of the Year,” recognizing its AI imaging advances in stroke and lung fibrosis care, U.S. market expansion, and significant improvements in patient outcomes.
Mapping the Epicenters of Pharma Innovation
In a recent post, Brian K. Buntz, Editor-in-Chief at R&D World, shared a geographic analysis of global pharma innovation centers, developed in collaboration with Maryam Daneshpour. The analysis dives into patent activity and financial metrics to reveal where pharmaceutical research and development are most concentrated.
The study employs a dual-weighted metric, combining total patent filings and market capitalization data from the first ten months of 2024. The results highlight key regional clusters with thriving innovation, showcasing the dynamic interplay between patent efficiency and financial performance.
According to the analysis, the findings show the dominance of several well-known hubs while also highlighting emerging and resilient regions:
Boston-Cambridge Corridor: Known for its deep integration of biotech, academic institutions, and research powerhouses, this region shows a high density of patent activity. Companies like Moderna and Biogen excel in R&D efficiency despite their relatively smaller scale.
San Francisco Bay Area: A leader in biotech and startup innovation, this cluster exhibits strong patent output relative to R&D investment, reflecting its entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Basel, Switzerland: The close proximity of Novartis and Roche continues to bolster both research output and financial performance, reinforcing the area's standing as a global pharma leader.
German Research Hub (Frankfurt-Heidelberg-Mannheim-Darmstadt): This cluster reportedly shows resilience, blending research intensity with manufacturing strength.
For this analysis, numerous metrics and attributes were collected, spanning over 800 rows and 50 columns; however, in the spirit of simplicity, let’s take a look at just the top 20 companies (excluding universities and non-profit institutes), ranked by their total patent count and some specific patent types.
Foundation Model for Precision Radiology
As part of our ongoing exploration of the growing trend in foundation models, another startup has appeared on the radar.
Raidium, a French company founded in 2022, is applying the concept to radiology, aiming to address the increasing demands experiences by radiologists. The field faces significant challenges, with rising workloads and a shortage of trained specialists—a problem that impacts both patient outcomes and radiologists' well-being.
Radiology is instrumental in early cancer detection, especially for diseases like lung cancer. For instance, CT scans enable a 95% five-year survival rate when lung cancer is caught at stage Ia. In contrast, late-stage diagnoses—common in 75% of cases without screening programs—result in a drastically lower five-year survival rate of just 16%.
Raidium is a French startup founded in 2022 by an ex-Owkin duo—radiologist Dr. Paul Hérent and data scientist Pierre Manceron. Their team is building an AI tool designed to support radiologists in their day-to-day work. The company recently raised €16 million in seed funding, with support from the European Innovation Council (EIC), to further its efforts.
Raidium’s solution is a multimodal foundation model for medical imaging. Trained on a proprietary dataset of over one billion real-world medical images, the system integrates image and text data to assist radiologists in identifying regions of interest, analyzing complex cases like metastatic cancer and liver diseases, and generating detailed reports. According to Raidium, its system can process some tasks 2,500 times faster than manual analysis.
Raidium’s goal is to build a tool that works as a "co-pilot," improving efficiency and accuracy while leaving critical decisions in human hands. The AI’s multimodal design, which integrates image and text data, also makes it a useful tool for biomarker discovery and research applications.
The company has already forged partnerships with academic groups like AP-HP and the North Imaging Center in Île-de-France, while working with pharmaceutical companies on imaging-related drug development. There’s also recognition from programs like Amgen’s BioLabs Hôtel-Dieu initiative, resulting in a Golden Ticket in 2023 for precision imaging and drug development.
The team is presenting their platform at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Congress in Chicago (booth 3853), where they just delivered their keynote speech at the AI Theater on December 1.
Injectable Immune Organs Against Ovarian Cancer
Ovarian cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers affecting women, claiming the lives of over 12,000 individuals annually in the United States alone. Despite its high mortality rate, research funding for ovarian cancer accounts for less than 1% of the total allocated to solid tumor studies, and since its symptoms often mimic benign conditions (such as heartburn or indigestion), leading to delayed diagnoses—80% of ovarian cancer cases are metastatic at the time of detection. For these patients, the five-year survival rate falls below 50%.
Notably, long-term survivors frequently develop lymphoid-like structures known as tertiary lymphoid organs, which are thought to help their immune systems prevent recurrence.
The Wyss Institute at Harvard University is exploring this phenomenon through its iNodes project, currently in the pre-validation stage. The effort, led by Senior Scientist Dr. Girija Goyal, focuses on creating injectable lymphoid organs designed to enhance immune responses against ovarian cancer. The team recently secured an ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health award to accelerate development and validation of this approach.
Dr. Goyal's concept for iNodes builds on her earlier work developing a Lymph Node Chip, part of the Wyss Institute’s human Organ-on-a-Chip initiative. This prior research focused on engineering immune structures in vitro, providing the foundation for creating injectable lymphoid organs aimed at treating ovarian cancer.
iNodes are engineered immune structures that can be injected directly into tumor sites or administered during surgery to stimulate the body’s immune defenses. Once injected, they would transform “cold tumors” (those that evade immune detection) into “hot tumors” (immune-activated), to promote a sustained anti-tumor response.
The project has already shown promising results in preclinical experiments. In earlier studies, the team demonstrated that injecting human immune cells mixed with extracellular matrix proteins into human tumor masses in mice led to the formation of lymphoid organs within the tumors.
These structures activated lymphocytes, which effectively eliminated immunologically active human lung cancer cells in laboratory assays. Now, the researchers aim to further de-risk the technology by testing its ability to shrink human ovarian tumors in mouse models, combining it with immune checkpoint therapies to enhance efficacy.
The technology envisions the use of patients' own immune cells, collected and formulated into lymphoid organ injections tailored to their tumors. These injections are expected to activate within days, offering protection against residual cancer cells and reducing the likelihood of recurrence.
According to Dr. Goyal, iNodes could significantly improve outcomes for patients by providing a cost-effective and accessible immunotherapy option with fewer manufacturing hurdles than traditional cell-based therapies.
AI-Driven Drug Gets FDA IND Clearance
A quick mention: Insilico Medicine celebrates their 10th AI-driven drug candidate to get FDA IND clearance, now well on its way to clinical trials.
The candidate, ISM5939, is an oral small-molecule inhibitor targeting ENPP1 (known for its role in regulating skeletal and soft tissue mineralization).
Designed in just three months using Insilico’s Chemistry42, part of their Pharma.AI platform, it aims to treat solid tumors by regulating extracellular cGAMP levels, activating the cGAS-STING pathway, and enhancing the host immune system’s anti-tumor response.
Insilico Medicine has nominated 20 preclinical candidates since 2021, achieving 10 IND clearances across its pipeline of over 30 drug discovery programs.
Earlier in 2024, Insilico Medicine published a study in Nature Biotechnology detailing the journey of ISM001-055, its flagship molecule and a TNIK inhibitor, from AI-based discovery to Phase II clinical trials. TNIK plays a critical role in lung scarring, making it a promising target for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
ISM001-055 recently demonstrated encouraging results in a Phase IIa trial (NCT05938920), showing favorable safety and tolerability, along with dose-dependent improvements in forced vital capacity (FVC), a key lung function measure.
Read also:
11 Biopharma Trends to Watch in 2024