New funding: Notch Therapeutics has raised a $85 million Series A round, bringing its total funding to $91 million. The biotech company was founded in 2018 and is developing stem cell-derived immunotherapies for cancer. Seattle expansion: The startup has offices in Vancouver, B.C. and Toronto and will use some of the new capital to open a facility in Seattle, adding another player to…
Seagen Inc. (Nasdaq:SGEN) and Astellas Pharma Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Kenji Yasukawa, Ph.D., “Astellas”) today announced primary results from the phase 3 EV-301 trial comparing PADCEV® (enfortumab vedotin-ejfv) to chemotherapy in adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who were previously treated with platinum-based chemotherapy and a PD-1/L1 inhibitor. At the time of pre-specified interim analysis, patients…
In the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines finished first. This includes those made by Pfizer and Moderna. These vaccines use a new approach to fight off pathogens (germs like viruses and bacteria). We recently talked to BRI’s Adam Lacy-Hulbert, PhD — who has long studied viruses and ways to combat them — to learn more about this new…
Seagen Inc. (Nasdaq:SGEN) today announced that the European Commission (EC) has granted marketing authorization for TUKYSA® (tucatinib) in combination with trastuzumab and capecitabine for the treatment of adult patients with HER2-positive locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have received at least two prior anti-HER2 treatment regimens. TUKYSA is an oral, small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) of HER2, a protein…
New funding: Ozette, a biotech company that last year spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), has raised a $6 million seed round. The Seattle-based company has eight employees with plans to double that number in the next few months with the fresh cash. Biotech innovation: The Ozette team has created an…
Boston-based biotech startup Ensoma launched Thursday and announced a $70 million Series A funding round. The company is built on technology developed over two decades by Seattle researchers Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Dr. André Lieber of the University of Washington School of Medicine. The company will be based in Boston because the city “is the epicenter of biotech and…
Just like us, immune cells need fuel to do their jobs. Despite the tight links between human health — including our immunity — and how our bodies process what we eat, the intersection of immunology and metabolism remains a poorly understood area of human biology. New awards announced today by The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Allen Institute, aim to improve that understanding by supporting four research projects in the…
Today’s Food and Drug Administration approval of Bristol Myers Squibb’s liso-cel for the treatment of non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a milestone in the development of T-cell therapies as potential cures for cancer. Dr. Stanley Riddell, an immunologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, carried out early CAR T-cell research that contributed to the development of this “living drug,” made by genetically…
In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. This was hailed as a turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, many people are hesitant about these new vaccines for a variety of reasons, and the proliferation of misinformation can make it difficult to know what…
Our microbiomes, the communities of microbes living in and on our bodies, influence everything from our weight to our cancer risk. But many of the mechanisms that link bacteria to our health remain murky. Now, a multidisciplinary team of scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute plan to study a new way they…