Human Immunology Biosciences, a clinical-stage biotech company, announced on Tuesday it emerged from stealth armed with $120 million. The company was developed by Monograph Capital and ARCH Venture Partners. It was started in 2021, per Crunchbase data. The San Francisco-based company is throwing its hat into the ring to tackle autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, a broad category of disease for which current treatments don't fix in full. Most drugs targeted at autoimmune and inflammatory diseases weaken the immune system, which makes patients more at risk of developing infection. Human Immunology Biosciences is targeting cells like plasma and mast cells that make up the immune system. The startup currently has two drug candidates in its arsenal. One of them, felzartamab, will target plasma cells that are considered the likely drivers of these diseases. It's the problem most drugs face, and that issue has propelled the targeted therapy movement in precision medicine we've seen in the last few years. The goal is to create drugs that better target the precise location of the disease and leave the rest of the body relatively untouched....
When Gloria Choi was making plans to launch her research lab at MIT, nearly 10 years ago, she thought it would be nice to find a side project where she could collaborate with her husband, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. The two scientists decided to look into a startling observation they had heard about as graduate students: A large study from Denmark showed that severe infections in pregnant women were correlated with a much higher risk of their children developing autism. Their work on this phenomenon, known as maternal immune activation, has since become a cornerstone of both of their research programs and yielded key insights into the mechanisms underlying this elevated risk. Choi, the Mark Hyman Jr Career Development Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, who recently earned tenure at MIT, and her husband, Jun Huh, an associate professor of immunology at Harvard, have also shown that an immune molecule called IL-17a, which is produced by immune cells during a fever, can temporarily reduce some of the behavioral symptoms of autism....
