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.

While the US biosimilars industry has generally been a disappointment since its inception, with FDA approving 33 biosimilars since 2015, just a fraction of those have immediately followed their approvals with launches. And more than a handful of biosimilars for two of the biggest blockbusters of all time — AbbVie’s Humira and Amgen’s Enbrel — remain approved by FDA but still have not launched because of legal settlements.

Kura Oncology is clear to resume studies for its early-stage leukemia program after the FDA lifted a clinical hold Thursday afternoon.

Regulators had placed the hold on a Phase Ib study of KO-539, an experimental oral treatment for some genetic subsets of acute myeloid leukemia last November after a patient died while taking the drug. Kura expects to begin enrolling patients again imminently, CEO Troy Wilson told Endpoints News.