Follow the Money: Using AI for Clinical Enrollment, Pan-KRAS Degrader Trial, MoreBy Clinical Research Staff
By Clinical Research Staff
January 28, 2026 | Mendra aims to employ AI to accelerate patient identification and clinical trial enrollment; PAQ Therapeutics will advance its ongoing Phase 1 development of PT0253, PAQ's KRAS G12D degrader; and more.
$305M: Series F for Clinical Development of Helicon Peptide
Parabilis Medicines announced the successful closing of a $305 million Series F financing. The financing will support the continued clinical development of FOG-001 (zolucatetide), the company’s lead investigational Helicon peptide and first and only direct inhibitor of the elusive β-catenin:TCF interaction, including progression toward a registrational trial in desmoid tumors and continued evaluation across a range of genetically simple and more complex tumor types. The financing will also support the progression of the company’s targeted discovery pipeline, such as its promising prostate cancer franchise, and additional efforts to leverage the company’s Helicon platform to unlock disease targets long considered “undruggable.”
$250M: Series B for Immuno-Fibrotic Disease
Mirador has closed a $250 million Series B financing. The proceeds will enable Mirador to deliver proof-of-concept across all current programs and support the development of additional pipeline candidates. Specifically, Mirador is pioneering precision medicine approaches designed to overcome the efficacy limits of modern treatments and transform care for immuno-fibrotic diseases.
$200M: Series C for Cell Stress Sensing Platform
Soley Therapeutics announced a $200 million Series C financing to advance its proprietary cell stress sensing platform and pipeline of novel therapeutics into the clinic. Proceeds will support IND-enabling work and clinical trials for two first-in-class internally discovered and developed oncology assets, in addition to advancement of the non-oncology stress-reducing drug candidates for neurodegenerative disorders and metabolic diseases, and continued platform scale-up.
$159.8M: Series A for Next-Gen Obesity and Metabolic Disease Therapies
Alveus Therapeutics announced its launch with a $159.8 million Series A financing. Proceeds from the financing will support Phase 2 clinical development of ALV-100, the company’s lead program, and Investigational New Drug filings of several early proprietary development candidates, including its highly selective Amylin peptide agonist. ALV-100 is a bifunctional glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor (GIPR) antagonist/glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) agonist fusion protein designed to deliver potent, durable weight loss and maintenance with improved tolerability, targeting key limitations of current chronic therapies.
$125M: Series B for Disease-Modifying Clustering Antibodies
Diagonal Therapeutics has closed an oversubscribed $125 million Series B financing. Proceeds will support advancement of DIAG723, a first-in-class, disease-modifying clustering antibody designed to correct the underlying cause of hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) and pulmonary arterial hypertension, conditions that collectively impact hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Diagonal expects to initiate its first-in-human trial for DIAG723 in HHT patients during the first half of 2026.
$112.5M: Series A for First-in-Class Inflammatory Bowel Disease Bispecific Antibody
Caldera launched with a $112.5 million Series A financing. Proceeds will fund ongoing clinical development of CLD-423, a bispecific antibody targeting the clinically validated IL-23p19 and TL1A pathways for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and other immunologic and inflammatory diseases. CLD-423 is advancing through Phase 1 with the goal of enabling clinical evaluation in patients with IBD.
$107M: Series B for Novel Bispecific Antibodies That Selectively Degrade Extracellular Protein Targets
EpiBiologics announced the completion of a $107 million Series B financing. Proceeds will advance multiple programs, including EPI-326 into a first-in-human clinical trial in early 2026 for EGFR-driven lung cancer and head and neck cancer. EPI-326 is a tissue-selective bispecific antibody that degrades all oncogenic forms of EGFR, is mutation-agnostic, and overcomes limitations of existing EGFR therapies by localizing degradation to the tumor while sparing normal healthy tissue. In preclinical studies, EPI-326 drives strong and durable efficacy with favorable safety and pharmacokinetics, enabling both monotherapy and combination approaches for multiple cancer types.
$83.5M: Series B for Next-Gen Precision Diagnostics Platform
Precede Biosciences has secured a $63.5 million Series B financing and a $20 million strategic non-dilutive credit facility. The financing will support scaling of the company’s platform to meet rapidly growing demand from developers of next-generation precision medicines. The Precede Bio platform supports the development and clinical use of today’s most intensively studied cancer therapies. For these medicines, target expression and pathway activity, rather than single genomic alterations, are the defining biomarkers. These therapies include drug-, radio-, and immune-conjugates, as well as other advanced mono- and multi-specific targeted modalities.
$82M: Series A for Advancing Rare Disease by Leveraging AI
Mendra launched in conjunction with the closing of an $82 million oversubscribed Series A financing. The funds will be leveraged to acquire and develop initial rare disease assets for Mendra’s portfolio. Mendra aims to modernize the development and commercialization of rare disease therapies to more efficiently reach patients on a global scale. The company plans to employ AI to accelerate patient identification, clinical trial enrollment, and access to global markets.
$80M: Seed Financing for First-in-Class Proximity-Modulating Therapeutics
Proxima (formerly VantAI) announced an oversubscribed $80 million seed financing. The funding will accelerate the advancement of first-in-class proximity-modulating therapeutics, expanding the druggable target space, and enabling more reliable discovery of novel mechanisms across oncology, immunology, and other disease areas. Proximity-based therapeutics work by controlling how proteins interact with one another, rather than simply inhibiting or activating a single target, and represent a superset that includes modalities that have the potential to unlock historically undruggable disease targets.
$77M: Series B for Pan-KRAS Degrader Trial
PAQ Therapeutics has closed a Series B extension, bringing the company's total Series B financing to $77 million. Proceeds from the financing will support the ongoing Phase 1 development of PT0253, PAQ's KRAS G12D degrader, as well as the clinical advancement of PT0511. PT0511 is a pan-KRAS degrader designed to target multiple oncogenic KRAS variants. The Phase 1 study is a first-in-human, open-label, dose-escalation trial evaluating the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and preliminary anti-tumor activity of PT0511 in patients with advanced solid tumors harboring KRAS alterations.
$59M: Series B for Advancing Alzheimer’s Therapy into Phase 2
EQT Life Sciences has raised $59 million in a Series B funding for the development of novel therapies for behavioral symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The funds will support Exciva's Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating Deraphan, the company's lead therapeutic candidate for agitation associated with AD. The trial will be conducted across the EU, United States, and Canada.
$55M: Series A for Noonan Syndrome Therapy
Think Bioscience has raised $55 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing. The funds will advance the company’s internal pipeline of first-in-class programs. The company’s synthetic biology platform uses high-throughput functional surveys to find pockets that others miss and uses them to advance small molecules with biochemical activities previously deemed difficult to achieve. Their lead program targets mutants that cause Noonan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 2,500 births. Noonan patients experience life-threatening cardiac and lymphatic issues, short stature, cognitive impairment, and pain, among other chronic symptoms.
$50M: Series C for Human Cell Programming Technology
bit.bio closed a $50 million Series C funding round. The proceeds will help the company move toward several key strategic milestones, including accelerating the development and delivery of its core product pipeline while scaling operational footprints to meet global demand. Central to this effort is the company’s ioCells technology, which facilitates a global shift toward new approach methodologies, particularly advanced cell-based models that improve the predictiveness of new medicines while reducing industry reliance on animal testing.
$35.1M: Seed Financing for Precision Cancer Vaccine
Infinitopes announced the successful completion of the second close of its seed financing round, securing an additional $15.4 million and bringing the total raised to $35.1 million. This funding comes as the company launches its first-in-human, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial of ITOP1, its leading precision therapeutic vaccine aimed at preventing recurrence in esophageal cancer. The Phase I/IIa VISTA trial is to be conducted across multiple UK NHS university cancer centers and positions Infinitopes at the cutting edge of the sector.
$19.8M: Series A for Lead Cancer Vaccine Development
ErVimmune announced the first closing of its $19.8 million Series A financing. The financing will drive the clinical development of ErVac01, ErVimmune’s lead candidate, a heterologous vaccine formulation containing a collection of human endogenous retrovirus-derived epitopes, designed to cover most of the worldwide population in terms of HLA alleles (e.g. >80 % in Asia and >95 % in Europe). By selecting antigens that are shared across patients and tumors, the resulting vaccine can be manufactured as a ready-to-use product rather than a personalized therapy. This is aimed at “cold” tumors such as triple‑negative breast cancer or ovarian cancer, which currently respond poorly to checkpoint inhibitors. The funding will also support the execution of a first-in-human clinical trial that will establish the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine.
$6.5M: Seed Financing for Non-Invasive Bladder Cancer Diagnosis
Cellens has raised a $6.5 million seed round. The financing follows compelling early clinical data generated with leading urologists at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, showing that the company’s urine-based bladder cancer test detected recurrence with strong diagnostic performance in an initial prospective clinical study. Cellens’ platform uses atomic force microscopy, a nanoscale “finger” that physically feels the biophysical properties of cancer cells, combined with proprietary machine learning algorithms trained on millions of cell–probe interactions. This enables the creation of biophysical biomarkers, a fundamentally new diagnostic signal based on the insight that cancer cells feel different than healthy cells.
$5M: Seed Financing for Novel “Glass-Box” Causal AI Platform
Allos AI announced $5 million in seed financing to commercialize the industry's first "glass-box" causal AI platform. The funding will support expansion across formulation development and data science as the company focuses on hard-to-genericize small-molecule medicines. Allos applies causal AI to reformulate complex small-molecule drugs by modeling how formulation, dosing, delivery, and patient biology interact to drive clinical outcomes. By doing so across stratified patient populations, the platform identifies reformulation paths that produce more predictable clinical benefit.







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