Immunotherapy player Altor BioScience just raised a $10.7 million equity round, according to a regulatory filing. Altor BioScience engineers a way to direct the immune system to treat a number of blood cancers, bladder cancer and acute respiratory disease.
It has three platforms: A soluble T-cell antigen receptor that zeroes in on cancerous or viral targets; a monoclonal antibody approach using tissue factor antagonists; and an IL-15 platform that’s meant to harness IL-15 super-agonists, antagonists and protein scaffolds to build novel immune molecules.
Calls and emails to the Florida company about this new round have yet to be returned. It looks from the SEC filings that this is the largest round Altor has raised to date.
Altor BioScience has been working on this approach for more than two decades, yet it remains venture-funded, with some revenue from creating reagents for research. It looks like Altor’s core science may finally be coming close to an inflection point, given the progress of several clinical programs:
This charts Altor’s progress by technology in the pipeline:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
