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.

It was great getting back to a live ESMO conference/webinar in Paris followed by a live pop-up event for the Endpoints 11 in Boston. We’re staying on the road in October with our return for a live/streaming EUBIO22 in London.

Silicon Valley Bank’s Nooman Haque and I are once again jumping back into the thick of it with a slate of virtual and live events on October 12. I’ll get the ball rolling with a virtual fireside chat with Novo Nordisk R&D chief Marcus Schindler, covering their pipeline plans and BD work.

Gilead is mounting its counterfeit drug lawsuit, naming two “kingpins” and a complex network of conspirators who allegedly sold imitation bottles of its HIV meds, some of which ended up in US pharmacies.

The pharma giant on Wednesday provided an update on what it called a “large-scale, sophisticated counterfeiting conspiracy,” accusing two new defendants of “leading and orchestrating” a scheme to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in illegitimate drugs posing as meds such as Biktarvy and Descovy.

The US Senate passed via unanimous consent on Thursday afternoon a bipartisan bill that would eliminate a federal mandate for animal testing for new drugs.

Touted as a much-needed modernization of FDA’s rules, co-sponsor Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) have said the bill will stop lots of needless suffering of animals.

Today the Senate unanimously passed my bipartisan FDA Modernization Act 2.0 to end animal testing mandates! This is an important step toward innovation and ending the needless suffering and death of animal test subjects. pic.twitter.com/vGpCCdpuOf

The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that it’s launching a new pilot program to help academic and other nonprofit researchers developing advanced therapy medicinal products, which includes cell and gene therapies.

Academics have proven to be enormously useful in feeding new products, like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies first developed by Memorial Sloan Kettering, and ushered to the market by biopharma companies. Jean Bennett, formerly with the University of Pennsylvania, also saw her research lead to the approval of gene therapy Luxturna, which Roche now owns.