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.

Just shy of four months ago, Gilead’s next-gen HIV drug candidate lenacapavir got hit with a CRL over CMC issues involving the type of vials planned for use. Now, the pharma is headed back to the FDA for round two.

Gilead announced Monday afternoon that it had refiled its NDA submission filled with new CMC data after the FDA essentially balked at borosilicate glass vials, originally used for the non-oral form of lenacapavir. The drug candidate, which recently won a positive opinion from Europe’s CHMP, is being developed for HIV-1 infection “in heavily treatment-experienced (HTE) people with multi-drug resistant (MDR) HIV-1 infection.”

Astellas and Sutro Biopharma are linking arms on a new field of antibody-drug conjugates that they hope will improve upon existing cancer immunotherapies.

The Tokyo pharma will dole out $90 million in cash for the collaboration, the companies said Monday afternoon. That upfront payment will extend the South San Francisco biotech’s runway from late 2023 into the first half of 2024, Cowen analysts noted.

Ireland has been on a roll in 2022, with several large pharma companies announcing multimillion-euro projects. Now AstraZeneca’s rare disease outfit Alexion is looking to get in on the action.

Alexion on Friday announced a €65 million ($68.8 million) investment in new and enhanced capabilities across two sites in the country, including at College Park in the Dublin suburb of Blanchardstown and the Monksland Industrial Park in the central Irish town of Athlone, according to the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland.

Amidst recently broader vaccine manufacturing initiatives from the EU and European companies, the G7 summit in the mountains of Bavaria has brought about some positive news for closing vaccine and medical product manufacturing gaps around the globe.

According to a statement from the White House, the G7 leaders have formally launched the partnership for global infrastructure, PGII. The effort will aim to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars to deliver infrastructure projects in several sectors including the medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing space.