| Name | Title | Contact Details |
|---|
Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals is a Cambridge, MA-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
Sera Prognostics is a leading proteomic and bioinformatics company dedicated to improving the lives of women and babies through precision biomarker-based tests designed to enhance pregnancy care. Sera’s vision is to deliver pivotal information in early pregnancy to physicians, to help them to improve the health of their patients and reduce costs of healthcare delivery. Sera’s PreTRM® Test reports to a physician the individualized risk of a pregnant woman to deliver prematurely, enabling earlier proactive interventions in patients with higher risk. Rigorous clinical validation of PreTRM® Test performance (accuracy of predicting premature delivery) was reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2016 in a U.S. cohort of 5,501 patients across 11 centers. Preterm birth is defined as any birth before 37 weeks gestation and is a leading cause of illness and death in newborns. The 2020 March of Dimes Report Card shows that of nearly 4 million babies born annually in the U.S., more than one in ten is born prematurely. Prematurity is associated with a significantly increased risk of major long-term medical complications, including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, chronic respiratory illness, intellectual disability, seizures, vision and hearing loss, and can generate significant cost throughout the lives of affected children. The annual U.S. health care costs to manage complications of prematurity were estimated at $31.5B for 2015. Sera is also developing a robust pipeline of innovative tests focused on other complications of pregnancy. Using its advanced proprietary mass spectrometry and bioinformatics platform technologies, Sera detects biologically important protein expression differences to build high performing predictions of risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes (including preterm birth, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, growth restriction, and others).
Aura Biosciences is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing virus-like drug conjugates (VDC), a novel class of therapies, for the treatment of multiple oncology indications. At Aura, our mission is to deliver meaningful therapeutic benefit to a range of cancer indications with high unmet need in which we believe we can establish a new standard of care. We are driven by our passion and commitment to science and the patients battling cancer who are relying on us to pioneer these new therapies. We are focusing the initial development of our VDC technology platform to treat tumors of high unmet need in ocular and urologic oncology. Belzupacap sarotalocan (bel-sar), our first VDC candidate, is being developed for the first-line treatment of early-stage choroidal melanoma, a rare disease with no drugs approved. Beyond early-stage choroidal melanoma, we are developing bel-sar in additional ocular oncology indications, including choroidal metastasis. Leveraging our VDCs` broad tumor targeting capabilities, we have also initiated a clinical program in non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, or NMIBC, our first non-ocular solid tumor indication.
Genprex (Nasdaq: GNPX) is a clinical-stage gene therapy company focused on developing life-changing technologies for patients with cancer and diabetes. Genprex`s technologies are designed to administer disease-fighting genes to provide new treatment options for large patient populations with cancer and diabetes who currently have limited treatment options. Genprex works with world-class institutions and collaborators to develop drug candidates to further its pipeline of gene therapies in order to provide novel treatment approaches for patients with cancer and other serious diseases.
At LAVA, we are focused on applying our expertise in gamma-delta T-cell engagers (TCEs) to transform cancer therapy. We refer to our compounds as gamma-delta bispecific T-cell engagers, or gamma-delta bsTCEs. Our platform generates therapeutics that specifically activate a unique and relatively abundant effector gamma-delta T-cell subset called Vγ9Vδ2 (Vgamma9-Vdelta2) T-cells that have the ability to trigger activity of immune cells of both the innate and adaptive immune system. Our gamma-delta bsTCEs have demonstrated superior efficacy and safety profiles compared to other bsTCE approaches in preclinical studies and show preferential activity against tumor cells thereby potentially limiting toxicity in healthy tissue. To date, we are the only company developing bispecific gamma-delta T-cell engaging antibodies for the treatment of cancer. We are building a pipeline of gamma-delta bsTCEs that have applications in both solid and hematologic malignancies. Our lead program, LAVA-051, targets the tumor specific antigen CD1d, which can be overexpressed in multiple myeloma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), among other tumor types. LAVA-051 will enter a Phase I/IIa study in 1Q21.