NeoTX Therapeutics and Active Biotech, meanwhile, are working on immunotherapy with naptumomab, which fuses the Fab fragment of an antibody targeting 5T4 with an engineered bacterial superantigen that activates T cell responses.

The work is being done in conjunction with biotech company Heat Biologics. This candidate vaccine will need to go through clinical studies before scientists will know if it works in people.

Filippo Petti is CEO of Celyad Oncology (Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium), a clinical-stage biotech focused on the discovery and development of CAR-T therapies. Here, he tells Pharm Exec how the pandemic affected his role as a US-based CEO to a Belgian company and what permanent changes it has brought to the way the company operates.

NeuBase leader Dietrich A. Stephan, Ph.D. says we’ve reached a digitally-enabled inflection point in disease therapy development.

Likewise, Compugen is positioning its anti-TIGIT therapy, COM902, alongside the company’s inhibitor of poliovirus-receptor-related immunoglobulin (PVRIG), a related co-inhibitory receptor that competes with DNAM-1 and TIGIT for binding to the CD122 ligand.

When the biotech got started in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was singularly focused on tarloxotinib, a small molecule inhibitor named for its design to target low oxygen levels in the tumor and thereby sparing healthy tissues. More than two years later, Rain has tripled its pipeline within days, first licensing a research program from Drexel University, then more recently nabbing a Phase II-ready drug from Daiichi Sankyo.