Tun­ing in: In­ten­si­ty's im­mune-based chemo de­liv­ery tech at­tracts back­ing of British bil­lion­aire Jim Mel­lon

In can­cer treat­ment, chemother­a­py and im­munother­a­py are of­ten seen as com­plete­ly sep­a­rate, if com­ple­men­tary, cat­e­gories of treat­ments. A tiny biotech out of West­port, CT now wants to shake up that par­a­digm — and has just raised $6.5 mil­lion to do so with back­ing from British bil­lion­aire Jim Mel­lon, crowd­fund­ing in­vestor V Cap­i­tal, Bat­ter­son Ven­ture Cap­i­tal and sev­er­al fam­i­ly of­fices.

What In­ten­si­ty Ther­a­peu­tics’ drug de­liv­ery tech al­lows them to do, CEO Lew Ben­der tells me, is to in­ject po­tent drugs di­rect­ly in­to the tu­mor, where they dif­fuse and dis­perse, es­sen­tial­ly at­ten­u­at­ing the can­cer with­out de­stroy­ing the cell sur­face. That makes the can­cer cells “much more rec­og­niz­able and there­fore more anti­genic for recog­ni­tion by the im­mune sys­tem,” un­leash­ing an at­tack not just on the in­ject­ed tu­mor but al­so on non-in­ject­ed ones, he says.

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