Ar­cus Bio­sciences, with its in­trigu­ing can­cer pipeline and big shot CEO, has been a VC fa­vorite since its in­cep­tion in 2015. Now, Google’s ven­ture arm is back­ing the Bay Area start­up in a new $107 mil­lion round, bring­ing the com­pa­ny’s to­tal haul to a quar­ter bil­lion in start­up cap­i­tal in two years.

The lat­est in­fu­sion of cash was led by GV (for­mer­ly Google Ven­tures), with top-tier VC funds lin­ing up to join, in­clud­ing Welling­ton Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny, EcoR1 Cap­i­tal and oth­ers.

It’s not hard to see why, as Ar­cus has all the things in­vestors like to see: drugs in a hot area of de­vel­op­ment, a chief ex­ec­u­tive with a stel­lar rep­u­ta­tion, and a pipeline stacked with sev­er­al im­muno-on­col­o­gy hope­fuls.

Ter­ry Rosen

Ar­cus’ CEO Ter­ry Rosen is best known as the guy who took Flexus Bio from in­cep­tion to a $1.25 bil­lion sale in less than two years. He joined Ar­cus short­ly af­ter the sale, where he and the ex­ec­u­tive team built the start­up in stealth un­til its com­ing out par­ty last Au­gust.

Now, Rosen is busy gear­ing up the start­up’s pipeline to en­ter the clin­ic.

“We have been as­sem­bling a team of staff, in­vestors, lead­er­ship and ad­vi­sors with a high­ly aligned long-term vi­sion to cre­ate, de­vel­op and com­mer­cial­ize in­no­v­a­tive can­cer im­munother­a­pies that may of­fer a mean­ing­ful ben­e­fit to pa­tients over ex­ist­ing treat­ments,” Rosen said in a state­ment.

Ar­cus is de­vel­op­ing small mol­e­cule and an­ti­body pro­grams with plans to build its own ar­se­nal of drug com­bos.

The new cash will be used to move for­ward AB928, a dual adeno­sine re­cep­tor an­tag­o­nist, and AB122, a PD-1 an­ti­body. Ar­cus start­ed a Phase I tri­al of AB928 in ear­ly No­vem­ber, and has a Phase I/II tri­al sched­uled for the first half of 2018 to test a AB928/AB122 com­bo in can­cer pa­tients.

The fresh cap­i­tal will al­so al­low Ar­cus to ac­cel­er­ate a cou­ple ex­tra ex­per­i­men­tal drugs in­to the clin­ic, in­clud­ing AB680 (small mol­e­cule CD73 in­hibitor) and AB154 (TIG­IT an­ti­body).

The in­vest­ment round comes a few months af­ter Ar­cus scored a deal (worth up to $816 mil­lion) to li­cense an an­ti-PD-1 an­ti­body de­vel­oped at Chi­na’s Glo­ria Phar­ma and WuXi Bi­o­log­ics.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

The government of the United Kingdom is giving out grants to several manufacturers that have a presence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The government announced that four companies, including Ipsen, contract manufacturer Pharmaron, DNA manufacturer Touchlight and diagnostic test producer Randox, will receive a total of £277 million ($341.1 million). According to a release from the UK government, this represents the first portion of grants from the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund.

A company with public links to Sanofi and Moderna has raised more money to expand its mission of improving diversity and enrollment in clinical trials.

Inato put the word out on Wednesday that it raised $20 million via an A2 round to advance its matching platform between pharma companies and potential clinical trial sites.

Inato CEO Kourosh Davarpanah told Endpoints News that with the $20 million in hand, it will pursue improvements to its diversity offerings, its focus on oncology and data collection.