When Jim Brod­er­ick launched Mass­a­chu­setts-based Palleon Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in 2015, he had an of­fice in Cam­bridge’s Kendall Square, a bit of seed mon­ey, and a blank can­vas.

He set out to in­no­vate with­in a new space in im­munol­o­gy, and re­cruit­ed sci­en­tif­ic co-founders Car­olyn Bertozzi, a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor, and Paul Crock­er, a pro­fes­sor and the head of the cell sig­nal­ing and im­munol­o­gy di­vi­sion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dundee, Scot­land, to help him do it.

“When you start a new com­pa­ny in biotech, you need to be in some­thing that’s new and big, and you need to have the world’s best sci­en­tists be­hind you,” Brod­er­ick, who was the first en­tre­pre­neur-in-res­i­dence at GSK’s ven­ture arm SR One, told End­points News.

On Wednes­day, the five-year-old com­pa­ny an­nounced the com­ple­tion of a $100 mil­lion Se­ries B round to de­vel­op its pipeline of gly­co-im­munol­o­gy ther­a­pies. Its lead pro­gram in on­col­o­gy, an en­zy­mat­ic sialo­gly­can de­grad­er, is ex­pect­ed to hit the clin­ic next year.

“Gly­can-me­di­at­ed im­mune reg­u­la­tion presents an enor­mous op­por­tu­ni­ty for nov­el ther­a­peu­tics to treat a range of dis­eases char­ac­ter­ized by im­mune sys­tem dys­func­tion, in­clud­ing can­cer and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases,” the CEO an­nounced in a state­ment. Be­fore Palleon, Brod­er­ick co-found­ed three oth­er biotechs, in­clud­ing Ra Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

Ac­cord­ing to Brod­er­ick, it’s been known since 1959 that tu­mors have dif­fer­ent gly­can struc­tures on their sur­faces. “But no­body could fig­ure out what the gly­cans were do­ing,” he said.

The an­swer, he added, was hid­ing in plain sight. “But no­body could see it, be­cause we didn’t re­al­ly have the lens to view the im­mune sys­tem in this way that we now do.” The tu­mors, he said, use evolved gly­can struc­tures to hide from im­mune sys­tem at­tacks. And so Palleon is work­ing on us­ing cell sur­face sug­ar mol­e­cules to mod­u­late im­mune ac­tiv­i­ty.

In ad­di­tion to its EA­GLE plat­form, which us­es en­zy­mat­ic sialo­gly­can degra­da­tion to over­come in­tractable bi­o­log­i­cal re­dun­dan­cy and en­able a pan-im­mune an­ti-tu­mor re­sponse, the com­pa­ny al­so has its HY­DRA plat­form, which char­ac­ter­izes can­cer pa­tients by their tu­mor sur­face gly­can pro­file to iden­ti­fy which pa­tients are most like­ly to re­spond. Palleon says it’s de­vel­op­ing a “broad pipeline” of can­di­dates that tar­get in­di­vid­ual Siglecs and oth­er gly­can-sens­ing re­cep­tors, which may be use­ful against in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases like au­toim­mu­ni­ty and fi­bro­sis.

The Se­ries B, led by Ma­trix Cap­i­tal Man­ae­ment, will help push that pipeline to­ward the clin­ic, Brod­er­ick said. Re­turn­ing in­vestors SR One, Pfiz­er Ven­tures, Ver­tex Ven­tures HC, Take­da Ven­tures, and Ab­b­Vie Ven­tures, and new in­vestor Sur­vey­or Cap­i­tal al­so chipped in.

“It’s just a whole oth­er an­gle of im­mune reg­u­la­tion… You couldn’t see it be­fore… and now when you see it, there seems to be a lot of op­por­tu­ni­ty,” Brod­er­ick said.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.

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.