Valora: Blocking cancer’s immune evasion via glycan targeting

Launched this month with a $30 million seed round co-led Avalon, Bregua and TigerGene, Valora has a new take on blocking immune evasion by cancer cells. The start-up views the pattern of sugar molecules on the surfaces of tumor cells as a code used to fool the immune system and is developing chimeric antibodies capable of disrupting the evasion signal.

Tumors remodel their cell surface glycosylation patterns for a variety of reasons, one of which is to facilitate engagement with sugar-binding immune checkpoints, enabling the cancer to avoid an immune attack as it continues to grow. ...