Ventus: A structural edge in innate immunity targets

Ventus emerged from stealth on Wednesday with a Versant-led $60 million series A round and a drug discovery platform designed to tackle one of the biggest challenges of targeting innate immune signaling: the lack of structural information on targets involved in pathogen sensing.

The company, which was incubated through Versant’s Inception Discovery Engine in Montreal, was formed last year to design and develop small molecules against targets in the inflammasome signaling and nucleic acid sensing pathways including NOD-like receptors, gasdermins and DNA and RNA-sensing enzymes. ...