It’s not just Amer­i­can star­tups that are tun­ing in­to the ris­ing in­ter­est in ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

Se­quoia Chi­na is lead­ing a $37 mil­lion Se­ries A in­to Full-Life Tech­nolo­gies, a biotech head­quar­tered in Shang­hai with of­fices in Brus­sels, Bel­gium, to de­vel­op a pipeline of ra­dioac­tive can­cer ther­a­pies.

The idea isn’t new: As clin­i­cians start­ed rou­tine­ly de­ploy­ing ra­di­a­tion to kill can­cer cells, sci­en­tists and drug­mak­ers have long been ex­plor­ing ways to lim­it that pow­er­ful ef­fect on­ly to can­cer cells while spar­ing healthy cells. But re­cent progress in the pro­duc­tion of ra­dioiso­topes — cou­pled with big in­vest­ments from Big Phar­ma, most no­tably No­var­tis and Bay­er — has in­spired a new wave of star­tups.

Tren­cy Gu

With pro­duc­tion sites in Cheng­du, Chi­na as well as Bel­gium, Full-Life wants to build an “end-to-end so­lu­tion” to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op some of the next-gen­er­a­tion can­di­dates, said Se­quoia Chi­na man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Tren­cy Gu.

Like the rest of the field, the com­pa­ny is work­ing on com­pounds that com­prise two parts: a ra­di­oli­gand to kill tu­mor cells and a guid­ing mol­e­cule to bring them there. It has a num­ber of op­tions on the lat­ter, with op­ti­mized sin­gle do­main an­ti­bod­ies as well as pep­tides. Full-Life said it al­so has its own link­ers to ra­dionu­clides, and pairs each de­vel­op­ment can­di­date with a ther­a­nos­tic nu­clide to gen­er­ate phar­ma­co­ki­net­ics/phar­ma­co­dy­nam­ics da­ta for bet­ter pa­tient se­lec­tion.

Its first tar­gets are fi­brob­last ac­ti­va­tion pro­tein (FAP), Claudin 18.2 and Guany­lyl Cy­clase C.

“The funds will en­able us to ad­vance our lead ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pounds in­to first-in-hu­man stud­ies next year and ac­cel­er­ate the de­vel­op­ment of our glob­al ra­dioiso­tope pro­duc­tion and lo­gis­tics ca­pa­bil­i­ties,” said co-founder, CEO and chair­man Lan­ny Sun.

Sun, who’s al­so a part­ner at Gor­dian Ven­tures, sold his last com­pa­ny, a de­vel­op­er of a com­pu­ta­tion­al drug dis­cov­ery plat­form named Sil­i­con Ther­a­peu­tics, to Roivant for $450 mil­lion in stock.

Al­so join­ing the syn­di­cate are Yu­nion Health­care Ven­tures, Jun­son Cap­i­tal, CD Cap­i­tal and Kun­lun Cap­i­tal.

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.