Rodos raises seed funding for infectious diseases and cancer discovery platform

Funding

Rodos BioTarget GmbH has received start-up funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Hannover Innovations Fonds for the further development of its TargoSphere drug delivery platform.

TargoSphere is a nanocarrier technology that enables targeted delivery of active agents to the antigen-presenting cells of the immune system, which are responsible for coordinating immune responses to infectious pathogens and cancer cells.

Certain pathogens, such as HIV and Hepatitis C, maintain persistent infectious reservoirs within antigen-presenting cells that cannot be eliminated by any existing treatments. Meanwhile malignant cells are capable of employing various mechanisms to fool the immune system, leading to a failure of the antigen-presenting cells to initiate recognition and destruction of the cancers.

Rodos’ aim is to re-establish an effective immune response against various infectious agents and cancer cells. TargoSphere selectively recognises specific cell-surface structures on antigen-presenting cells and delivers active agents intracellularly to these immune cells. The company’s principal development objective is to destroy intracellular reservoirs of HIV and Hepatitis C, and to provoke an effective immune response to various malignancies, including liver and colorectal cancer.

Rodos also has a collaboration with an unnamed pharmaceutical company to develop applications of its nanotargeting technology in other disease areas.

Marcus Furch, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, said, “As an emerging biotech company, we are very pleased to have reached a financing round with outstanding partners in these economically turbulent times. We believe this has placed us in a position to validate our platform technology on the preclinical level, as well as to achieve additional value-increasing steps.”

Rodos’ technology was developed originally under the direction of the Let There Be Hope Medical Research Institute in the US. In 2008, this technology and responsibility for its clinical development and marketing was transferred to the founders of Rodos BioTarget, GmbH, Michael Scolaro, Robert Gieseler, Jörg Ruppert and Marcus Furch.

The start-up investment of  High-Tech Gruenderfonds, and Hannover Innovation Fonds will be used to bring the technology to completion of pre-clinical animal trials in its first year, and early clinical trials in humans in its second year.