Chris Thanos wants to send bac­te­ria af­ter your tu­mors.

Specif­i­cal­ly, he wants to send sal­mo­nel­la af­ter your tu­mors, a ge­net­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied form of the mi­crobe that he and his team have neutered and retro­fit­ted with ge­net­ic war­heads. It’s an at­trac­tive idea, at least to Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund and Panacea Ven­ture, who to­day co-led a $34 mil­lion Se­ries A round for Thanos’s Berke­ley-based com­pa­ny, Ac­tym Ther­a­peu­tics.

“Think about a cock­tail ther­a­py in a sin­gle drug,” Thanos, founder and CEO of the new com­pa­ny, told End­points News. “These en­gi­neered mi­crobes can eas­i­ly do that be­cause you can load up a de­sired com­bi­na­tion of pay­loads.”

The idea is a riff off on­colyt­ic virus­es. This form of treat­ment, first ap­proved in 2015, in­fects a pa­tient with a virus that, in turn, trig­gers an im­mune re­sponse against cer­tain tu­mors. The prob­lem, Thanos said, is that they can be giv­en on­ly once and they af­fect the en­tire body, po­ten­tial­ly caus­ing off-tar­get ef­fects as dos­ing in­creas­es.

The idea be­hind sal­mo­nel­la and oth­er bac­te­ria — and Ac­tym is not alone in this idea — is that you can en­gi­neer to se­lec­tive­ly grow in tu­mor mi­cro-en­vi­ron­ments, which are im­mune-sup­press­ing. When the can­cer cells con­sume the bac­te­ria, they give off vi­ral-like ge­net­ic ma­te­r­i­al that trig­ger an im­mune re­sponse, at­tract­ing T Cells and mono­cytes that go af­ter the tu­mor.

The idea, Thanos said, is to get the hom­ing ac­cu­ra­cy of bac­te­ria with the im­mune sig­nal­ing of virus­es.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” he said.

The com­pa­ny is still ear­ly stage. Thanos, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked at Halozyme and Sutro, and two oth­er co-founders in­cu­bat­ed over the past three years in Berke­ley. They’re up to 8 em­ploy­ees and are plan­ning to an­nounce a drug can­di­date by the end of the year, al­though Thanos ac­knowl­edged that Covid-19 could de­lay that time­line. They’ll start out try­ing to get the bac­te­ria to stim­u­late type 1 in­ter­fer­on. The goal, though, is to be able to hook up al­most any­thing to the mi­crobes: cy­tokines, al­ter­na­tive an­ti­body scaf­folds, even cy­to­tox­ic chem­i­cals. The last ap­proach would act like an an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate, al­low­ing high dos­es of chemother­a­py to be de­liv­ered di­rect­ly to tu­mors.

”The sky’s the lim­it,” Thanos said.

Despite all the excitement over the possibility of T cell therapies to crack the code against solid tumors, early safety data have limited the burgeoning field’s promise. A clutch of players hope to solve that problem by “masking” their drugs, and now one of those outfits has snared fresh investor cash to take its shot in the clinic.

Amunix closed a $117 million Series B to guide AMX-818, a masked protease-activated T cell engager for HER2 expressing tumors, to the clinic as well as shepherding its bustling pipeline of tumor hunters through the preclinical stage, the company said Thursday.

The jury’s still out on whether the first wave of AI companies can significantly change drug development, but investors are increasingly buying into the hype.

Exscientia, the decade-old UK machine learning outfit, announced Thursday that they’ve expanded their Series C, first announced in May, from $60 million to $100 million. The expansion most notably includes BlackRock, the private equity firm that has been wading deeper and deeper into biotech. They now join Novo Holdings, Bristol Myers Squibb and others among the company’s most recent backers.

CRLs. 483s. CBER, CDER and RWE. For biopharma professionals, these acronyms command attention because of the fundamental role FDA plays in drug development. Now Endpoints is doubling down on regulatory coverage, and launching a weekly report focusing on developments out of White Oak, with analysis and insight into what it all means.

Coverage will be led by our new senior editor, Zachary Brennan. He joins Endpoints from POLITICO, where he covered pharma. Prior to that he was the managing editor for Regulatory Focus, a news publication from the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society.