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.

With just days before President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 booster rollout is set to go into effect, an FDA advisory committee appeared on the verge of not recommending boosters for anyone in the US before a last-minute change of wording laid the groundwork for older adults to have access to a third dose.

The FDA’s adcomm on Vaccines and Related Biological Products (VRBPAC) roundly rejected Pfizer/BioNTech booster shots for all individuals older than 16 by a 16-2 vote Friday afternoon. Soon after, however, the agency posed committee members a new question limiting booster use to the 65-and-older population and individuals at high risk of disease due to occupational exposure or comorbidities.

AstraZeneca and Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo think they’ve struck gold with their next-gen ADC drug Enhertu, which has shown some striking data in late-stage breast cancer trials and early solid tumor tests. Getting into earlier patients is now the goal, starting with Enhertu’s complete walkover of a Roche drug in second-line breast cancer revealed Saturday.

Enhertu cut the risk of disease progression or death by a whopping 72% (p=<0.0001) compared with Roche’s ADC Kadcyla in second-line unresectable and/or metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer patients who had previously undergone treatment with a Herceptin-chemo combo, according to interim data from the Phase III DESTINY-Breast03 head-to-head study presented at this weekend’s #ESMO21.

In recent months, the battle for PD-(L)1 dominance has spilled over into early cancer with Merck’s Keytruda and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo all alone on the front lines. Keytruda now has another shell in its bandolier, and it could spell a quick approval.

Keytruda cut the risk of relapse or death by 35% over placebo (p=0.00658) in high-risk, stage 2 melanoma patients who had previously undergone surgery to remove their tumors, according to full data from the Phase III KEYNOTE-716 presented Saturday at #ESMO21.

Merck has worked hard to bring its I/O blockbuster Keytruda into earlier and earlier lines of therapy, and now the wonder drug appears poised to make a quick entry into early advanced cervical cancer.

A combination of Keytruda and chemotherapy with or without Roche’s Avastin cut the risk of death by 33% over chemo with or without Avastin (p=<0.001) in first-line patients with persistent, recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer, according to full data from the Phase III KEYNOTE-826 study presented Saturday at #ESMO21.

Everest Medicines is on a roll with two licensing deals in one week.

The Shanghai-based biotech has paid Sinovent and SinoMab $12 million upfront for the rights to a BTK inhibitor for renal diseases, the company announced Thursday. The deal comes just days after Everest came away with rights to a Covid-19 vaccine in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.

Everest will pay Sinovent and SinoMab up to $549 million in milestone payments and royalties. The agreement includes tech transfer of Sinovent and SinoMab’s manufacturing process for the candidate, named XNW1011.