Private Company Edition: The pre-J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference financing news deluge during the first week of 2021 included several significant venture capital deals, including a $226m series B round for Affinivax, Ikena’s $120m series B round and an $88m series A round for Aro.

Profiles of AdverseEvents, AventaMed, Ensysce Biosciences, Jounce Therapeutics, LensGen, Marvao Medical Devices, Pharmasum Therapeutics, and Rotation Medical.

Ensysce Biosciences Inc. is developing a nanoscaled delivery system that might work for many types of potential drugs but will first be applied to siRNAs, a class of drug candidates that inspired tremendous excitement a decade ago, but has since been abandoned by many of its former champions. The Houston, TX-based start-up believes it can harness single-walled carbon nanotubes to deliver siRNAs that will block or “silence” the genetic instructions encoded by messenger RNA, and thereby stop targeted genes from producing disease-related protein.