Stephen Elledge

Lea Hachi­gian, a prin­ci­pal at the Long­wood Fund, re­calls work­ing with Har­vard pro­fes­sor Stephen Elledge three years ago on the launch of TCR-fo­cused TScan Ther­a­peu­tics. Elledge ini­tial­ly set out to screen anti­gen-TCR match­es in a faster, more sys­tem­at­ic way and spent sev­en years putting to­geth­er the tech for a plat­form that could run mul­ti­ple T cell re­cep­tors against anti­gen epi­topes and pin­point the ex­act pairs that ap­pear to in­ter­act.

And last month, that project, TScan, land­ed a $100 mil­lion crossover round to con­tin­ue the work. The biotech is al­so sev­er­al months in­to a part­ner­ship with No­var­tis.

“As we were work­ing with him on TScan, we start­ed to get to know some of the oth­er work in his lab a lit­tle bit more deeply, and re­al­ly we kind of cen­tered on the Im­muneID tech­nol­o­gy,” Hachi­gian said.

This past spring, Long­wood ap­proached Elledge about form­ing a new biotech around the plat­form. And on Wednes­day, Im­muneID was born with $17 mil­lion in seed fund­ing to iden­ti­fy and tar­get the an­ti­body in­ter­ac­tions that dri­ve im­mune dis­eases. Hachi­gian, who al­so helped found TScan, is tak­ing the helm as CEO.

While TScan is fo­cused on T cell tar­gets, Im­muneID is look­ing at an­ti­body tar­gets. Its screen­ing plat­form, which uti­lizes AI tech­nol­o­gy, is de­signed to give a read­out of the tar­gets cho­sen by an­ti­bod­ies in a par­tic­u­lar pa­tient sam­ple. And every time they run the plat­form, a huge amount of da­ta is col­lect­ed on hun­dreds of thou­sands of an­ti­body in­ter­ac­tions.

“So you can imag­ine what you find are an­ti­bod­ies against virus­es if that’s what you’re in­ter­est­ed in, you find IgE an­ti­bod­ies against al­ler­gens that could cause ana­phy­lax­is, you find au­toan­ti­bod­ies that might be mark­ers of au­toim­mune dis­ease, can­cer, etc.,” Hachi­gian said.

In the case of al­ler­gies, which will be the com­pa­ny’s main fo­cus to start, a pa­tient might be mount­ing an im­prop­er an­ti­body re­sponse to a peanut. Once you know the an­ti­bod­ies and where they’re tar­get­ing on peanut pro­teins, you can in­ter­fere with that in­ter­ac­tion, Hachi­gian ex­plained.

Im­muneID’s oth­er fo­cus ar­eas will in­clude au­toim­mu­ni­ty, on­col­o­gy, and in­fec­tious dis­ease. By the end of this year, the CEO ex­pects the small five- or six-per­son com­pa­ny to grow to 10 or 12. Long­wood led the seed round, with help from Arch Ven­ture Part­ners, Pi­tan­go HealthTech, In-Q-Tel, Xfund, and oth­er undis­closed in­vestors.

“The tar­gets are al­ready there, they’re just wait­ing for us to es­sen­tial­ly… go through with our plat­form and pull them out,” Hachi­gian said.

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.