Valora Therapeutics, which raised $30 million in seed funding, is built upon research by Stanford scientist Carolyn Bertozzi and MIT researcher Jessica Stark.
Immunotherapy has transformed cancer care over the past decade, thanks to the advent of "checkpoint inhibitors," which block a common way tumors are able to evade the body's immune defenses.
The drugs' name relates to the proteins they target. Signaling between these proteins -- found on the surface of immune and tumor cells -- can keep an immune cell from recognizing and destroying a malignant one.
Valora Therapeutics, which emerged from stealth Wednesday with $30 million in seed funding, is taking aim at a different kind of checkpoint. Rather than proteins, Valora is focusing on sugar molecules called glycans that it says also act as important immune system communicators.
The startup's technology is built on research conducted by Carolyn Bertozzi, the Stanford University scientist who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2022 for her work on "click" chemistry, and Jessica Stark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher in biological and chemical engineering.
Bertozzi and Stark are scientific founders and advisers to Valora, which was founded in 2023 with help from Stanford's Innovative Medicines Accelerator. Their work showed that these glycans act on so-called lectin receptors found on immune cells. Disruptions in this communication can give rise to immunosuppression in tumors or defective immune control in inflammatory disease, Bertozzi and Stark found.
"Immune cells are all the time patrolling in the body and trying to detect something that is abnormal and destroy it," said Miguel Garcia-Guzman, the CEO of Valora. "Nobody has figured out so far how to restore the proper communication of the sugar molecules in cancer in [such] a way [that] you can rebuild immune anti-cancer competency. That's the new mechanism we're trying to address with our own technology."
Valora envisions the immunotherapies it's designing as useful in treating both cancer and immune disorders. Dubbed antibody-lectin chimeras, or "AbLecs," they resemble an antibody, but with one of the usual Y-like arms replaced with a lectin domain. The antibody structure provides the drug's cell targeting capabilities, while the lectin half binds to glycans to either reduce or activate their signaling.
"The AbLec platform represents a significant leap forward in manipulating glycoimmunology and unlocking new paradigms in immunotherapy," Stark said in a statement.
Valora will use the seed funding to develop its AbLec platform and launch preclinical studies, Garcia-Guzman said. A veteran of Rakuten Medical and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Garcia-Guzman approached Bertozzi and Stark soon after a journal article detailing AbLec's potential was posted on a preprint server. He joined the company in April.
Valora takes its name from the Latin word for courage, but also plays on the root "val," which means something worthwhile, Garcia-Guzman said. "We thought it was very good symbolism."
The $30 million financing was co-led by Avalon BioVentures, venture capital firm Bregua Corporation and TigerGene. Alexandria Venture Investments and Correlation Ventures also participated.
"We believe Valora has the team and resources to lead the development of novel AbLec therapeutics and to rapidly advance this groundbreaking technology toward the clinic," Sally Madigan, a managing partner at Avalon, said in a statement.
The company will operate its R&D facility out of Avalon's accelerator in San Diego.