Most cancer biotech sells treatment. Nouscom is pitching prevention, and investors have put $135M behind the idea.
The Basel company closed an oversubscribed Series D co-led by M Ventures and Revelation Partners. New backers include Angelini Industries, the European Investment Bank’s Aurea facility and Neva SGR, while every existing investor re-upped, among them 5AM Ventures, EQT Life Sciences, Versant Ventures, Bpifrance and CDP Venture Capital.
One global, registration-enabling trial of NOUS-209 is what the cash buys: an off-the-shelf vaccine for people with Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition affecting roughly one in 300 people and carrying a lifetime cancer risk of up to 80%, with colorectal risk near 50% against 2% in the general population. Carriers currently get surveillance and elective surgery, and on June 1 the US Food and Drug Administration handed the programme Fast Track designation.
The design distinguishes it from the personalised shots now reaching the market. Merck and Moderna tailor their melanoma vaccines to each patient’s tumour. NOUS-209 instead delivers 209 shared frameshift neoantigens through two viral vectors, training T cells against markers that recur across carriers, so a single manufactured product can treat anyone with the mutation.
Early data is thin but encouraging. A Phase 1b/2 study gave 45 healthy carriers a priming dose and a booster eight weeks later, and every one of the 37 whose immune responses could be measured mounted a neoantigen-specific response, still detectable a year on in 85% of them, while grade-three fatigue showed up in 4%.
Chief executive Marina Udier, who took the role in 2019 after the death of co-founder Riccardo Cortese, argues the field has left carriers with nothing but surveillance and surgery. The trial is built to change that, and to test whether a vaccine can stop tumours before they form.
