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.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Inovio was one of the first vaccine developers to snag attention for a jab that their execs said promised to end the Covid-19 pandemic. Using their own unique DNA tech, CEO Joseph Kim said it took just 3 hours to work it out.

But while rivals are racing to the finish line with ambitious plans to make vast quantities of their vaccines with billions of dollars of deals, Inovio is still stuck at the starting line on manufacturing.