Like a few oth­er CEOs, Bar­bara We­ber emerged from the JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence up­beat. She had been test­ing the wa­ters of a Se­ries B for her can­cer start­up, Tan­go Ther­a­peu­tics, since the fall and af­ter a few in­vestor meet­ings in San Fran­cis­co, a lead in­vestor had stepped for­ward, set­ting the stage for a size­able round.

“We just didn’t re­al­ize that in the mid­dle of that we’d end up in a glob­al pan­dem­ic,” We­ber told End­points News. “I won’t lie to you, it was a lit­tle nerve-wrack­ing — when we were just get­ting things sort­ed out and do­ing al­lo­ca­tions, the first mar­ket crash hap­pened.”

To­day, though, Tan­go has emerged with a $60 mil­lion Se­ries B led by Box­er Cap­i­tal and joined by Cor­morant As­set Man­age­ment and Cas­din Cap­i­tal. On top of the $55 mil­lion Se­ries A from Third Rock Ven­tures and a $50 mil­lion deal from Gilead, the new round brings them to a to­tal of $155 mil­lion raised to ad­vance their CRISPR-based ap­proach to find­ing new tar­get­ed can­cer drugs — an ef­fort, We­ber said, that the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic has on­ly pushed back a few weeks.

They were able to shift their re­search ac­cord­ing to where the out­break was.

“We had a lot of work on­go­ing with Chi­nese CROs and we took prob­a­bly a 3-4 week de­lay when Chi­na was re­al­ly locked down,” We­ber said, adding they moved some ex­per­i­ments in-house.   “When we had to shut down they were ac­tu­al­ly com­ing back up.”

Tan­go’s ap­proach is built around a con­cept called syn­thet­ic lethal­i­ty, the con­cept that un­der­girds PARP in­hibitors. Those drugs tar­get a pro­tein in pa­tients with a mu­ta­tion on one of the pro­teins used to re­pair DNA. One mal­func­tion­ing pro­tein leads to er­rors in the DNA that can give rise to can­cer, but if you knock out the oth­er pro­tein, the can­cer cells are so un­able to re­pair its DNA that it dies.

Re­searchers have long sus­pect­ed there were oth­er genes that played sim­i­lar roles but lacked good ways of find­ing them.  Most drugged onco­genes are those that over­ex­pressed, but here you were try­ing to de­tect an ab­sence. (PARPs had been dis­cov­ered es­sen­tial­ly by guess-and-check).

Many in­clud­ing No­var­tis had large pro­grams that used syn­thet­ic RNA to find these, but they proved un­re­li­able, a fact that got wide me­dia at­ten­tion last year af­ter a Sci­ence Trans­la­tion Med­i­cine pub­li­ca­tion.

“There were just way too many false pos­i­tives,” We­ber said. “You could get 200 and then you just have to sort through that and maybe some­times all of them were false.”

To find these genes, Tan­go us­es CRISPR to knock out in­di­vid­ual genes in can­cer cell lines. The genes that, when knocked out, led to cell death are con­sid­ered po­ten­tial drug tar­gets. Tan­go will in the next few months an­nounce their first can­di­date, al­though that one is based on in­sights from a project run at the Broad In­sti­tute. In-house projects are com­ing, We­ber said.

Syn­thet­ic lethal­i­ty, though, is just one of three ap­proach­es Tan­go is tak­ing. A sec­ond in­volves un­marked onco­genes. And a third in­volves search­ing for genes that tu­mors use to tamp down the im­mune sys­tem and it’s what land­ed them a deal with Gilead worth up to $1.7 bil­lion. Find­ing these genes in­volves a sim­i­lar CRISPR-based ap­proach, but is more com­plex be­cause it re­quires an ac­tive im­mune sys­tem.

In oth­er words, you need mice. You en­gi­neer those mice and use CRISPR to knock out genes in vi­vo, a much longer and more repet­i­tive process. Gilead will be work­ing close­ly with Tan­go on these pro­grams, but Tan­go has the rights op­tion on 2 out of 5 of the po­ten­tial drugs that could emerge, part of their long-term goal of be­com­ing a ful­ly in­te­grat­ed biotech.

“As far as we know, we’re the on­ly com­pa­ny with an es­tab­lished plat­form,” We­ber said of their im­mune sup­pres­sion pro­gram, not­ing that a cou­ple of aca­d­e­m­ic cen­ters are do­ing sim­i­lar work. “It’s very new, it’s very la­bor in­ten­sive.”

At the end of January, the European Medicines Agency officially launched its new clinical trials info system (CTIS), although the migration to the new platform has only really just begun, and sponsors have until the end of January 2023 before all initial trial applications must be submitted through CTIS.

Overall, 56 clinical trial applications have been submitted in CTIS during the first 3 months since the launch of the system on Jan. 31, according to new data posted by the EMA. By comparison, about 4,000 new trials are authorized each year across Europe.

As concerns related to uptake and distribution continue to linger, Switzerland is among the first countries that plans to destroy hundreds of thousands of expired and unused Covid-19 vaccine doses.

The European country said it plans to destroy more than 600,000 doses of Moderna’s Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine as the doses have reached their expiration date.

However, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he’s in the process of throwing 30 million doses in the garbage, exclaiming, “We have a big demand problem.”

More than 500 stakeholders sent comments to the FTC on whether the commission should look further into pharma middlemen, known as PBMs, with many of the commenters calling for more federal oversight.

Similar to the critical open comment period in a deadlocked FTC session last February, pharmacies and pharmacy groups are continuing to call out the lack of transparency among the top 3 PBMs, which control about 80% of the market.