Less than a month af­ter of­fer­ing a glimpse at ear­ly clin­i­cal da­ta for its lead can­cer im­munother­a­py at vir­tu­al ES­MO, Sen­sei Bio­ther­a­peu­tics has reeled in $28.5 mil­lion to wade deep­er in­to Phase II.

The Mary­land-based biotech, for­mer­ly known as Panacea, is look­ing to ex­pand Phase II tri­als for SNS-301, an en­gi­neered in­ac­ti­vat­ed bac­te­rio­phage de­signed to “awak­en” the im­mune sys­tem. “Right now we’re re­al­ly fo­cused on adding ad­di­tion­al Phase II clin­i­cal and trans­la­tion­al da­ta to sup­port SNS-301,” CEO John Celebi said.

The round, which the com­pa­ny is call­ing a Se­ries AA, fol­lows sev­er­al seed rounds, Celebi said. It was led by Cam­bri­an Bio­phar­ma and H&S Ven­tures, and will fund the Phase II de­vel­op­ment of SNS-301. It will al­so help ready the biotech’s ear­li­er can­di­dates for IND ap­pli­ca­tions, which could come some­time in the next 12 to 18 months. That in­cludes SNS-401, a po­ten­tial vac­cine cock­tail against Merkel cell car­ci­no­ma, and SNS-VISTA, an an­ti­body-based ther­a­peu­tic.

Last sum­mer, Sen­sei joined forces with As­traZeneca to test SNS-301 in com­bi­na­tion with Imfinzi in two Phase II tri­als across mul­ti­ple sol­id tu­mors. And at ES­MO, the biotech read out ear­ly da­ta from a Phase I/II study of the can­di­date and Mer­ck’s Keytru­da for ad­vanced head and neck can­cer. One of 9 pa­tients eval­u­at­ed at the time had a par­tial re­sponse, with a tu­mor re­duc­tion of 43%, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

“The ap­proval of pem­brolizum­ab is an ex­cit­ing event for pa­tients, but clear­ly there’s a lot of room for im­prove­ment,” Celebi said, cit­ing a Keynote-012 study which showed Mer­ck’s drug achieved an 18% over­all re­sponse in pa­tients with metasta­t­ic squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma of the head and neck.

CMO Marie-Louise Fjaell­skog not­ed in a state­ment:

To date, we have ob­served promis­ing clin­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty that is cor­re­lat­ed with im­mune re­sponse for SNS-301, in­clud­ing a par­tial re­sponse in a pa­tient with PD-L1-neg­a­tive dis­ease. This ini­tial da­ta from 9 pa­tients pro­vides us with the ra­tio­nale to con­tin­ue ex­plor­ing its safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy in 1^st and 2^nd line SC­CHN pa­tients.

Fu­ture Ven­tures, Chris­t­ian Anger­may­er’s Ape­iron In­vest­ment Group, and Pre­sight Ven­tures al­so chipped in to the round.

“With ex­pe­ri­enced man­age­ment and sci­en­tif­ic teams, Sen­sei is well po­si­tioned to be­come a leader in next gen­er­a­tion of im­mune-on­col­o­gy ther­a­peu­tics,” Cam­bri­an Bio­phar­ma CEO James Pey­er said in a state­ment.

The biotech industry has faced repeated calls to diversify its workforce — and in the last year, those calls got a lot louder. Though women account for just under half of all biotech employees around the world, they occupy very few places in C-suites, and even fewer make it to the helm.

Some companies are listening, according to a recent BIO survey which showed that this year’s companies were 2.5 times more likely to have a diversity and inclusion program compared to last year’s sample. But we still have a long way to go. Women represent just 31% of biotech executives, BIO reported. And those numbers are even more stark for women of color.

The Biden administration’s goal of kicking off its booster shot drive for the entire US population this week is not quite going as planned.

First, Pfizer applied for approval of a supplemental application for the booster shots, but since last Friday’s adcomm reviewing them, the plan has devolved into an EUA, which the FDA issued late Thursday evening.

The population that is now eligible for the booster, six months after receiving the first pair of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, also narrowed from what Pfizer applied for (everyone who’s eligible for the initial Pfizer shots) to just those who are 65 or older, or at high-risk of a Covid infection, including health care workers and others with occupational hazards.

A final look at the results of the placebo-controlled Moderna trial in the New England Journal of Medicine, published Thursday afternoon, shows how the vaccine continues to prevent Covid-19 and severe cases after more than five months following the second shot.

Of the more than 30,000 enrolled in the trial that ultimately led to the vaccine’s EUA, only two people in the vaccine group got a severe form of the disease, compared to 106 in the placebo group — leading to an efficacy of 98%.

Bluebell Capital Partners, a proxy brawler fresh off a campaign to oust global food giant Danone’s CEO and most of its board of directors, has bought a stake in UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline with its eyes trained directly on Emma Walmsley, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

The London-based hedge fund joins another notorious activist firm in Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, which earlier this year called for a shakeup in leadership at GSK to handle what the company described as a wealth of riches across the drug giant’s portfolio hindered by limited vision from top staff.

A year after raising a $47 million launch round, the fungi-loving drug hunters at Hexagon Bio have more than doubled their coffers.

Hexagon announced today that it raised another $61 million for its efforts to design cancer and infectious disease drugs based on insights mined from the DNA in millions of species of fungi. The new financing brings Hexagon’s committed funding to over $108 million.