Verseau launches with $50 million to develop immunotherapies

The Bedford, Massachusetts, start-up Verseau Therapeutics has launched with $50 million to develop immunotherapies that target a class of immune cells called macrophages. Existing checkpoint inhibitor therapies help activate T cells to attack some tumors, but the drugs don’t work for everyone. Verseau hopes it can treat more cancers by targeting proteins that can activate macrophages. Many of the firm’s lead programs are antibodies, but it also has licensed lipid nanoparticles from Bob Langer and Dan Anderson’s labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to deliver silencing RNA therapies.