Are­navirus­es. They’re small, they’re packed with tiny stolen ri­bo­somes that re­sem­ble grains of sand, they’re re­spon­si­ble for 300,000 to 500,000 hu­man in­fec­tions in West Africa each year, and, if a new Ger­man biotech has their way, they are go­ing to one day treat tu­mors.

Aba­los Ther­a­peu­tics launched to­day with $12 mil­lion in fund­ing to de­vel­op are­navirus­es it hopes can be used in im­munother­a­py for can­cer. The fund­ing was co-led by Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund (BIVF) and Gru­en­der­fonds Ruhr, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from NRW.BANK and High-Tech Gru­en­der­fonds (HT­GF).

CEO Mar­cus Kost­ka

Aba­los Ther­a­peu­tics CSO Jörg Vollmer told End­points News the plat­form stood out for its nim­ble­ness com­pared to oth­er on­colyt­ic virus ap­proach­es.

“We use the nat­ur­al adap­tion pos­si­bil­i­ty and prop­er­ties of the virus adapt­ed to the tu­mor cell,” Vollmer said. “So we are not re­strict­ed, re­al­ly.”

Aba­los is en­ter­ing an in­creas­ing­ly crowd­ed field of small biotechs and phar­ma gi­ants try­ing to lever­age virus­es and the body’s nat­ur­al de­fense sys­tem against them to treat can­cer. Over the last 3 years, As­traZeneca, Mer­ck, Boehringer In­gel­heim, Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb and J&J have inked deals of var­i­ous sizes with on­colyt­ic virus biotechs, with J&J putting up the largest fig­ure at $1.04 bil­lion.

Where­as im­munother­a­pies such as CAR-T re-en­gi­neer im­mune cells to see and tar­get tu­mors, like out­fit­ting a fight­er jet with in­frared or a sub with radar, on­colyt­ic virus­es work by light­ing up the tu­mor cells tar­gets. A virus that is de­signed to prop­a­gate pri­mar­i­ly through can­cer cells is in­ject­ed in­to a pa­tient. The body then car­ries out its nat­ur­al im­mune re­sponse to the virus, which hap­pens to be in can­cer cells.

Un­like oth­er on­colyt­ic virus­es — such as the her­pes-virus-based T-Vec from Am­gen, the first such ther­a­py ap­proved in the US — are­navirus­es don’t them­selves kill cells. Like in the Junin and Las­sa in­fec­tions that are­navirus­es can cause in hu­mans, the dam­age comes from the body’s im­mune re­sponse. In a po­ten­tial im­munother­a­py, that re­sponse would be di­rect­ed to can­cer cells.

Kost­ka told End­points News their plat­form was not anti­gen-spe­cif­ic and thus could be used to tar­get a wide range of can­cers.

Like much of vi­rother­a­py re­search, their work is pre­clin­i­cal. They said they are aim­ing for an IND in three years.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

It’s been a busy fall on Wall Street — and this week, we’ve got another biotech going public after Ventyx yesterday.

Massachusetts solid-tumor biotech Xilio Therapeutics made its public debut today, joining 149 other biotechs that have gone public so far this year.

Back on October 1st, Xilio filed its S-1 with the SEC to make its IPO debut for $100 million — the next step in financing after completing a $95 million Series C back in February.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.