A cou­ple of years ago, GSK’s ven­ture arm SR One brought in Jim Brod­er­ick as its first-ever en­tre­pre­neur-in-res­i­dence. And to­day, they’re back­ing his new can­cer R&D play, help­ing bankroll a $47.6 mil­lion start­up round for his up­start biotech Palleon.

Jim Brod­er­ick

These past two years have in­clud­ed an ed­u­ca­tion in the con­verg­ing roles of gly­co­science and hu­man im­munol­o­gy, Brod­er­ick tells me. Start­ing with ob­ser­va­tions on the vary­ing role of gly­cans in ei­ther ac­ti­vat­ing or brak­ing the im­mune sys­tem, his search in­volved bring­ing to­geth­er some of the top sci­en­tists in the field.

“I got in­trigued with this,” says Brod­er­ick. “It was an un­der-ex­plored area.”

Now Palleon and Brod­er­ick plan to re­solve all that.

The com­pa­ny has been hatch­ing what it’s dubbed Gly­coim­mune Check­points, bind­ing to the sug­ar mol­e­cules found on cell sur­faces, which have evolved as tu­mors de­vel­oped dif­fer­ent means of hid­ing from an im­mune sys­tem as­sault. That ap­proach of­fers a new, much broad­er path­way to mount­ing an im­mune sys­tem at­tack on can­cer cells, which Palleon in­tends to ex­ploit.

In par­tic­u­lar, Brod­er­ick is pumped by the prospect that unique pat­terns of gly­cans can be used to iden­ti­fy which pa­tients are most like­ly to re­spond, of­fer­ing a more tar­get­ed de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy.

Brod­er­ick has been in­volved in a slate of biotech star­tups, in­clud­ing his role as chair­man and co-founder at Ra Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. There are two key sci­en­tif­ic co-founders in his cor­ner now: Howard Hugh­es in­ves­ti­ga­tor Car­olyn Bertozzi at Stan­ford and Paul Crock­er, pro­fes­sor of gly­coim­munol­o­gy and head of the di­vi­sion of cell sig­nal­ing and im­munol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dundee, Scot­land. That gives you an idea of the glob­al na­ture be­hind the small, Waltham, MA-based biotech.

Along the way, Brod­er­ick says he’s be­come en­am­ored with the ap­proach of the big cor­po­rate ven­ture arms in the in­dus­try. That helps ex­plain his syn­di­cate: SR One, Pfiz­er Ven­tures, Ver­tex Ven­tures HC (out of Sin­ga­pore), Take­da Ven­tures and Ab­b­Vie Ven­tures.

SR One pres­i­dent Jens Eck­stein said:

We are very ex­cit­ed about the launch of Palleon. With­in the dy­nam­ic field of im­muno-on­col­o­gy, Palleon has forged an en­tire­ly new path­way for tar­get­ing the im­mune sys­tem. The unique fea­tures of Gly­coim­mune Check­points will make pos­si­ble a much wider range of ra­tio­nal com­bi­na­tion ther­a­pies to treat can­cer.

The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence has been a bright spot within the agency in terms of speeding new treatments to patients. That flexibility was on full display this morning as FDA released new draft guidance spelling out exactly how oncology drug developers can fulfill both the accelerated and full approval’s requirements with just a single randomized controlled trial.

While Congress recently passed legislation that will allow FDA to require confirmatory trials to be recruiting and ongoing prior to granting an accelerated approval, the agency is now making clear that the initial trial used to win the AA, if designed appropriately, can also serve as the trial for converting the accelerated approval into a full approval.

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The company, which launched eight years ago, is one of a growing group of companies seeking a digital alternative to traditional medicine. The space saw a record $7.5 billion in investments in 2021, according to Chris Dokomajilar at DealForma, with uses spanning ADHD, PTSD and other indications. However, private insurers have been slow to hop on board.