Our best weapon against cancer may already live inside us — it just needs a little prodding. That’s the premise behind Normunity, which launched Tuesday with $65 million from investors to develop a suite of drugs that it dubs “immune normalizers” to help restore the natural ability of the immune system’s T cells to infiltrate and destroy tumors.
The company is headquartered in downtown Boston and conducts research in West Haven, Conn., at BioLabs, a shared lab facility at Yale West Campus. The location allows the firm to work closely with its scientific founder Lieping Chen, a pioneer of cancer immunotherapy and an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine.
Chen played a key role in the discovery of checkpoint proteins, parts of the immune system that he and others found were restricting T cells from attacking tumors. Drugs that block these proteins, called checkpoint inhibitors, can help unleash T cells on tumors.
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