California-based CalciMedica closed a Series D round on Thursday to advance its portfolio of calcium release-activated calcium (CRAC) inhibitors, including Auxora, which is being tested in both Covid-19 and acute pancreatitis patients.

The push abroad raises fresh concerns over clinical trials exploiting economically developing nations. Vaxart, maker of a potential Covid vaccine that comes in tablet form, is gearing up for a Phase II trial. The company plans to consult foreign ministries of health and ethics committees to set up ethical trials. That might include a crossover study that guarantees the vaccine for all participants, says Sean Tucker, the company’s chief scientific officer.

Sotio’s cell platform, called DCVAC, starts with a patient’s peripheral blood mononuclear cells, which are grown into dendritic cells (DCs). In parallel, the company uses a proprietary device to pressurize tumor cells from cell lines, and the right amount of HHP makes the cells more immunogenic. The company picks “cell lines with expression profiles that show the most overlap with a patient’s tumor profile,” says Sotio’s CTO, Luděk Sojka, PhD. Then, adding the HHP-killed tumor cells to a patient’s DCs makes them express a variety of tumor antigens on their surface.

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

X4 Pharmaceuticals is developing a class of small molecule therapeutics that work as antagonists of chemokine receptor, CXCR4, the disruption of which is implicated in a number of primary immunodeficiencies (PIs) and cancers.

That’s the question a new biotech is aiming to answer, as SalioGen Therapeutics emerges from stealth Monday morning with a $20 million Series A. And they believe they’ve found a new delivery system that can more precisely deliver genes in vivo than the relatively large adeno-associated virus or CRISPR system: mammalian-derived enzymes.