After digging through discards, biotech startup is making a $45M bet it can fix a failed cancer therapy

The results were clear: Naptumomab estafenatox failed to prolong overall survival for renal cell carcinoma patients in a large trial, definitively enough that Active Biotech effectively shelved it in 2013. But three years later NeoTX, a scavenger startup that had been digging through drugs that failed in hopes of finding a subpopulation with a biomarker that the original developer had missed, stumbled upon the data and saw the unexpected gem they were looking for.