USA – Actym Therapeutics, a Berkeley, Calif.-based immuno-oncology company, completed a $34m series A financing.
The round was led by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) and Panacea Venture, with participation from Illumina Ventures, Korea Investment Partners (KIP), and JLo Ventures. With the close of the Series A financing, the Actym Board of Directors has expanded to include Kanad Das, Ph.D., Investment Director at BIVF, James Huang, MBA, Founding Managing Partner of Panacea Venture, and Alexis Ji, Ph.D., Partner at Illumina Ventures. The company will use the proceeds to advance development of immunotherapies from its microbial-based STACT platform into the clinic for the treatment of various cancers. Led by Christopher Thanos, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, Laura Hix Glickman, Ph.D., Vice President Research, and Mark Frohlich, M.D., Chief Medical Advisor, Actym has developed a microbial-based immunotherapy platform called STACT (S. Typhimurium Attenuated Cancer Therapy). In preclinical studies, STACT specifically enriches in many types of solid tumors and not in healthy tissue. Once there, STACT delivers multiplexed immuno-modulatory payloads directly to tumor-resident immune cells. Many of these payloads are of significant interest to the biopharmaceutical community but are intractable using conventional approaches due to systemic toxicities after IV dosing. Furthermore, STACT has been engineered to deliver payload combinations, which facilitates engagement of multiple biological pathways from a single therapy.27/04/2020
