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Invictus Oncology
A Delhi drug-discovery company, founded in 2011, that designed platinum-based cancer drugs and antibody-drug conjugates using nanoscale chemistry. None of its drugs is known to have reached a trial in people, and its US patents passed in 2018 to a US company now called Alyssum Therapeutics.
Also called: Invictus Oncology Private LimitedInvictus Oncology Pvt. Ltd.
Overview
Invictus Oncology Private Limited was co-founded in 2011 by Raghunath Mashelkar, former Director General of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Shiladitya Sengupta of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and is based in Delhi. Its releases describe a supramolecular platform for designing anticancer drugs: VOLVOX, a computational method for designing supramolecular therapeutics (published in ACS Nano in 2016), and CORDLink, for building antibody-drug conjugates, presented as posters at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in 2015. In 2017 its scientists published a platinum-linked antibody-drug conjugate platform in Chemical Science.
In February 2016 the company announced that Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, had invested as part of the first close of its Series A round, joining Navam Capital and Aarin Capital; the amount was not disclosed. The same release named its lead molecule, IO 125, as validated in multiple cancer models and about to enter the studies needed before an FDA application to begin trials in people.
US patent records show patents filed by Invictus Oncology assigned to Akamara Therapeutics, Inc. with effect from January 2018, and Akamara renamed Alyssum Therapeutics in March 2022. Alyssum, co-founded by Sengupta, now runs a phase 1/2 trial of AT-1965. A March 2026 SEC filing lists Invictus Oncology among the companies Sengupta consults for.
People
2Shiladitya Sengupta
Associate Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School; director, Center for Engineered Therapeutics
NanomedicineDrug deliverySupramolecular therapeutics
A pharmacologist who designs cancer drugs carried in nanoscale particles and has co-founded several companies built on that work, in the US and in India.
Ratan Tata
Chairman of Tata Trusts, whose cancer care programme is building a network of 20 hospitals across seven Indian states
Distributed cancer careCancer care in IndiaEarly detection
Under his chairmanship Tata Trusts launched a cancer care programme in 2017 to bring affordable treatment closer to home: 20 hospitals across seven states and, with the Assam government, a three-level network of 19 cancer facilities across the north-east.
Notes
- No trial of IO 125 or any other Invictus Oncology drug was found on ClinicalTrials.gov. India's trial registry (CTRI) requires a captcha and was not searched. What IO 125 is, and which cancer it was meant for, is not stated in any primary source read; secondary press calls it platinum-based and aimed at triple-negative breast cancer, which is not recorded here.
- The company website now shows only its Delhi address and its secure page fails; the descriptions of its team and platforms come from archived copies and its own press releases.
- Company status: a registry aggregator (Tofler, which republishes Ministry of Corporate Affairs data) shows CIN U24232DL2011PTC217394 as active, incorporated on 11 April 2011, with its last annual general meeting on 30 September 2024. The Ministry's own portal requires a captcha and was not read. Two of the company's US patents are recorded as expired for unpaid fees.
- No source states that Alyssum's AT-1965 comes from an Invictus Oncology molecule; the link recorded is the patent assignment only.
- Navam Capital, Aarin Capital and Romulus Capital (whose own page says it invested in 2017) are not OnCo investor records, so the investors field is empty.
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Sources
Every source this page cites, grouped by who published it. Grouping is read from the web address, not assigned by hand.
prnewswire.com · 2
archive.org · 1
bioprocessonline.com · 1
google.com · 1
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