If ArsenalBio does it right, its first CAR-T candidate — a potential treatment for ovarian cancer — will be in the clinic later this year.

And a group of deep-pocketed investors are betting $220 million that it can.

South San Francisco-based ArsenalBio launched out of the gate in late 2019 amid a wave of activity forming around cell therapy 2.0, with promises of putting together an “arsenal” of technologies that can engineer cells more precisely, in order to strike the perfect balance on efficacy and safety.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

I hope your weekend is off to a nice start, wherever you are reading this email. As for me, I’m trying to catch the tail of the Lunar New Year festivities.

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Massachusetts-based iVexSol has secured funding to the tune of $23.8 million in its latest Series A round. The new investors include Bristol Myers Squibb, manufacturer Charles River Laboratories and Asahi Kasei Medical.

iVexSol is a manufacturer of lentiviral vectors (LVV), used in making gene therapies, and this latest round of fundraising brings its total Series A total over $39 million, which will be used to recruit more employees and bolster its technology.

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While mRNA took center stage at yesterday’s FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting, Novavax announced its plans to deliver an updated protein-based vaccine based on new guidance.

Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) members voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all future vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

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Sana Biotechnology is finally headed to the clinic.

Thursday afternoon, the biotech announced the FDA had cleared its application to start a clinical trial for its allogeneic, or “off-the-shelf,” CAR-T cell therapy targeting the antigen CD19 for patients with B-cell lymphomas and leukemias. Sana said its therapy, dubbed SC291, was designed to evade the immune system, which could help cell therapy produce a more durable response in patients, a concern that has followed such off-the-shelf therapies that use donor cells as opposed to a patient’s own cells.

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With the clock ticking on F-star Therapeutics’ takeover by a Chinese buyer, the companies are still scrambling to remove a hold on the deal from the US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

F-star and invoX Pharma said they are “actively negotiating” with CFIUS “about the terms of a mitigation agreement to address CFIUS’s concerns regarding potential national security risks posed by the transaction.”

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