Pharmaceutical Business review

Normunity raises funds to develop immuno-oncology therapies

Normunity intends to use the funds for advancing the emerging pipeline of immune normalisers into the clinic. Credit: Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay.

Led by Canaan Ventures, the financing round has seen participation from Taiho Ventures, Osage University Partners, and Sanofi Ventures.

Normunity intends to use the funds for advancing its emerging immune normalisers’ pipeline into the clinic.

Its primary pipeline programmes target mechanisms which drive T cells exclusion into immune-sensitive tumours and for delivering an active and effective immune system into ‘cold’ tumours.

The financing will also be used to support several discovery platforms in the Lieping Chen lab, for pursuing other mechanisms that help in blocking the normal anti-cancer immunity.

Normunity is developing a new class of precision immuno-oncology medicines, known as immune normalisers.

These immune normalisers target the new mechanisms that free the normal immunity of the body against cancer.

The company’s pipeline is based on the ongoing academic-biotech research at Lieping Chen lab at Yale School of Medicine.

Normunity’s unique model is a collaborative workflow between the Lieping Chen lab and the company.

Together, they will identify new immuno-oncology mechanisms using proprietary platforms and jointly validate the emerging targets preclinically and clinically.

Normunity founding CEO Rachel Humphrey said: “Normunity is leading the way in establishing a new roadmap for I-O drug discovery with a simple and powerful premise: to free the immune system to work with maximal potential against cancer.

“With our scientific approach, we are pioneering novel mechanisms where there is unexplored potential for new medicines.

“With our R&D model, we have established a first-of-a-kind collaboration with the Lieping Chen lab that has already been prolific in identifying and validating novel targets.”