MusiQ Bio lands $2.59M Texas grant to push ultrasound cancer therapy toward trials
What's the deal? MusiQ BioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a biotechnology company spun out of UT Southwestern Medical CenterDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has received a $2.59 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to advance an ultrasound-based cancer immunotherapy platform. The funding will support development of Microbubble-assisted Ultrasound-guided Immunotherapy of Cancer, or MUSIC.
What's the endgame? MUSIC uses microbubbles as targeted delivery vehicles for cGAMP, a molecule that activates the STING pathway and stimulates immune responses, including cancer-fighting T cells. When exposed to ultrasound, the bubbles collapse, creating forces that deliver cGAMP into targeted immune cells. The approach concentrates immune activation at specific sites while reducing problems linked to delivering cGAMP throughout the body.
Why now? In 2022, UT Southwestern's Lux Lab reported in Nature Nanotechnology that MUSIC reduced tumor growth in mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer and eliminated tumors in 60% of treated animals. The team has since reported results in melanoma models and is studying the technology in pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma.
The grant will help MusiQ Bio generate the preclinical evidence needed to move MUSIC toward first-in-human clinical trials. The company is also developing SONATA, a system using bubbles roughly one-tenth the size of those in MUSIC, allowing deeper tumor penetration.
"This funding has the potential to bring a platform known as Microbubble-assisted Ultrasound-guided Immunotherapy of Cancer (MUSIC) to first-in-human clinical trials within five years," said Sina Khorsandi, co-founder and chief scientific officer of MusiQ Bio.
The company was created around technology developed by researchers including Jacques Lux and Khorsandi. "Other ways to deliver cGAMP are problematic," said Lux, co-founder and an associate professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at UT Southwestern. "They don't have the layer of targeting and control we have, which is required for cGAMP efficacy."
The signal: The grant ranks among the largest for food- and bio-adjacent grant rounds in the US, sitting in the 94th percentile across a sample of 1,650 comparable deals. For an early-stage academic spinoff, non-dilutive state funding offers a path to clinical milestones without diluting early investors.
Read more: pulse2.com
Image credit: MusiQ Bio
