Af­ter dig­ging through dis­cards, biotech start­up is mak­ing a $45M bet it can fix a failed can­cer ther­a­py

The re­sults were clear: Nap­tu­momab estafe­na­tox failed to pro­long over­all sur­vival for re­nal cell car­ci­no­ma pa­tients in a large tri­al, de­fin­i­tive­ly enough that Ac­tive Biotech ef­fec­tive­ly shelved it in 2013.

But three years lat­er NeoTX, a scav­enger start­up that had been dig­ging through drugs that failed in hopes of find­ing a sub­pop­u­la­tion with a bio­mark­er that the orig­i­nal de­vel­op­er had missed, stum­bled up­on the da­ta and saw the un­ex­pect­ed gem they were look­ing for.

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