After years of focusing on de-risked late-stage products, the M&A market is showing a renewed appetite for risk. Recent large deals for early-stage and platform companies signal a return to an era where buyers gamble on foundational science.

The company's platform creates drug microparticles large enough for tumor retention but with a massive surface area for sustained drug release. This is counterintuitive to typical engineering, where surface area is increased by making particles smaller, and it forms the basis of their intellectual property.

By delivering a high, sustained local drug concentration, Nenology's platform shifts cancer cell death from a passive process (apoptosis) to immunogenic cell death. This releases antigens that actively prime the immune system, creating a secondary anti-tumor effect and potentially boosting the efficacy of other immunotherapies.

Pathways like integrins have long been of interest but lacked effective therapeutic approaches. The advent of new technologies, such as antibody-drug conjugates and checkpoint inhibitors, has created opportunities to re-explore these older targets with potent, modern drugs, breathing new life into decades-old research.

By reformulating existing oncology drugs, Nenology uses the streamlined 505(b)(2) regulatory pathway, de-risking and accelerating development. Simultaneously, their composition-of-matter patents provide strong intellectual property protection typically associated with entirely new chemical entities, creating a unique strategic advantage.

The rapid advancement of ARPIs wasn't just a scientific breakthrough. It was a rare convergence of FDA interest in new endpoints, a deeper biological understanding of castration resistance, and intense industry and academic collaboration that created a uniquely fertile ground for innovation.

Historically, intratumoral therapy was limited by the physical difficulty of reaching tumors. The rise of a new discipline, Interventional Oncology, has largely solved this access problem. The critical bottleneck is now the lack of drugs specifically designed and optimized for local delivery and sustained retention within the tumor.

With patent cliffs looming and mature assets acquired, large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly paying billion-dollar prices for early-stage and even preclinical companies. This marks a significant strategic shift in M&A towards accepting higher risk for earlier innovation.

When seeking partnerships, biotechs should structure their narrative around three core questions pharma asks: What is the modality? How does the mechanism work? And most importantly, why is this the best differentiated approach to solve a specific clinical challenge and fit into the competitive landscape?