Seattle biotech startup BrainChild Bio has raised $116 million to advance an experimental CAR T cell therapy for one of the deadliest forms of childhood brain cancer.

The Series A financing will primarily fund a pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of an investigational therapy being developed for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. The rare brainstem tumor primarily affects children ages 5 to 10 and has few treatment options.

The financing was led by an undisclosed private family fund and foundation, with participation from BrainChild Bio’s initial investor, Seattle Children’s, and new investor WRF Capital.

BrainChild Bio is building on CAR T cell technology developed at Seattle Children’s and licensed exclusively to the company in 2023. The approach involves genetically engineering a patient’s own T cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.

The company says its new therapy has now entered its ILLUMINATE Phase 2 study, designed as a registration-stage trial that could eventually support an application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

DIPG presents a particularly difficult challenge for cancer researchers because the tumors grow in the brainstem, an area critical to basic functions, and the blood-brain barrier can limit the ability of treatments to reach the tumor.

BrainChild Bio’s approach delivers the CAR T cells directly into cerebrospinal fluid through an implanted catheter, allowing the cells to reach the tumor locally and potentially be administered repeatedly.

About 300 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with DIPG each year, a devastating brain tumor with no cure and few treatment options. Radiation is the current standard of care, but children diagnosed with DIPG have a median overall survival of only about 11 months.

BrainChild Bio also plans to use proceeds from the new financing to advance a CAR T therapy designed to target three different cancer markers, toward initial clinical testing in glioblastoma.

The company was founded by Michael Jensen, who previously helped develop the underlying work at Seattle Children’s and was a co-founder of Umoja Biopharma and Juno Therapeutics. The CEO is Steven Brugger, who most recently served as founder and CEO of Affinivax, a biotech company which was acquired by GSK for $3.3 billion in 2022. 

“This financing enables us to chart our path forward to serve the children and families afflicted with devastating brain tumors and represents a new paradigm for treating CNS brain tumors in children and adults,” Jensen said in a statement. “Our team at BrainChild Bio is steadfast in its commitment to harness CAR T cell technology in CNS tumors and we are uniquely positioned to do so.”

Vara has received CE certification allowing its AI to clear some mammograms as normal without radiologist review, marking a step toward autonomous medical AI.

The post AI Can Now Clear Some Mammograms Without a Radiologist’s Review appeared first on TechRepublic.

Vara has received CE certification allowing its AI to clear some mammograms as normal without radiologist review, marking a step toward autonomous medical AI.

The post AI Can Now Clear Some Mammograms Without a Radiologist’s Review appeared first on TechRepublic.

An AI system built by Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) has found evidence that a common form of breast cancer, long thought to be a poor candidate for immunotherapy, might actually respond to it.

The finding, produced by Ai2’s AutoDiscovery system, has led to an expanded partnership with the Paul G. Allen Research Center at Providence Swedish Cancer Institute, which is now deploying the AI system on its own patient data to look for similar scenarios across other types of disease.

The announcement Thursday illustrates the broader potential for AI to uncover findings that human researchers, overwhelmed by the massive scale of modern datasets, might otherwise miss.

“Cancer researchers have access to extraordinary datasets, but the challenge is no longer collecting data; it’s understanding everything those datasets have to tell us,” said Dr. Kelly Paulson, who leads the Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Paul G. Allen Research Center, in a statement.

AutoDiscovery, announced by Ai2 in February, works differently from most AI research tools: instead of waiting for a scientist to pose a question, it starts with a dataset and generates its own hypotheses, ranking them by how much they challenge existing assumptions.

In a research paper posted to the preprint server MedRxiv, the Ai2 and Providence Swedish researchers explain that they applied AutoDiscovery to The Cancer Genome Atlas, a federal dataset spanning more than 30 types of cancer.

The system flagged signs that invasive lobular carcinoma, which accounts for about 15% of U.S. breast cancer diagnoses, may be more responsive to immunotherapy than researchers thought. It has largely been left out of immunotherapy trials.

The Providence Swedish team confirmed the finding in a second patient dataset and validated it in tumor tissue in the lab. They cautioned that the findings don’t prove immunotherapy would work in these patients but suggest the question warrants further study.

The collaboration connects two organizations that trace their origins to the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who founded Ai2 in 2014 and whose $20 million donation helped establish the research center at Swedish in 2024.