Engineering the Virus That Fights Cancer: Why We Invested in Nucleovir Therapeutics
- Ahammad Shibil
- Jun 11
- 4 min read
At Speciale Invest, we back founders solving problems the rest of the world has decided are too hard. Nucleovir Therapeutics is exactly that kind of company — and this is the story of why we invested.
The unfinished business of immunotherapy
A decade ago, immunotherapy rewrote what was possible in cancer. Instead of poisoning tumors directly, a new class of drugs, checkpoint inhibitors like Keytruda and Opdivo, taught the body's own immune system to do the killing. They took the brakes off the immune cells and let them attack. Melanoma went from a near-certain death sentence to something many patients now survive. Lung cancer outcomes improved meaningfully. Billions of dollars in market value followed — but the bigger story was the clinical progress underneath it.
But that breakthrough has hit a ceiling
On their own, these drugs help only 20–40% of patients across solid tumors, and that number drops into the single digits in tumors the immune system can't actually see. The field calls these "cold" tumors: the immune cells never get inside, so releasing the brakes does nothing if the immune system was never pointed at the target.
Cold tumors aren't the exception. They're most of the disease. Glioblastoma — the deadliest brain cancer — along with pancreatic, colorectal, and hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancers all sit here. Together they represent millions of patients a year who cycle through chemo and radiation and come out no better off. Glioblastoma is the starkest example: median survival is still 14–16 months, with only 5–7% of patients alive at five years. A century of progress in oncology, and it has barely moved.
The field knows it. The entire next wave of cancer immunotherapy is circling one question: how do you turn a cold tumor hot? That's the problem Nucleovir was built to solve.
Why oncolytic viruses are the next modality
Using viruses to fight cancer isn't a new idea — doctors noticed tumors shrinking after viral infections as far back as the early 1900s. What's been hard is the engineering: building a virus that's safe, precise, effective, and manufacturable at scale has been close to impossible with traditional methods.
Oncolytic viruses (OVs) work in two ways that make them well suited to this moment.
First, they kill cancer cells directly. Unlike chemotherapy, which poisons everything, an OV can be engineered to recognize and replicate only inside tumor cells.
Second — and this is what matters most for cold tumors — that destruction sets off an immune alarm. As the tumor cells rupture, they spill out the signals that mark them as dangerous, and the immune system that had been ignoring the tumor suddenly notices it. The cold tumor turns hot. In effect, the virus turns the tumor into a vaccine against itself, priming a body-wide response that can reach even tumors that have already spread.
The data backs this up. Paired with checkpoint inhibitors, OVs have shrunk tumors in 39–62% of patients, versus roughly 18% for checkpoint drugs alone — the virus creates the inflammation that makes the immune system pay attention. And the field has matured: there are now more than 200 active OV trials globally, with recent programs like RP1 in melanoma and CG Oncology's bladder cancer work strengthening both the clinical and commercial case. This is no longer a fringe modality; it's becoming a core layer of next-generation cancer treatment.
The bigger opportunity is larger than OVs alone. The most important oncology companies of the next decade won't be single-modality businesses — they'll combine modalities well. OVs are powerful partners precisely because they create the inflammatory context other therapies need to work, which makes them especially relevant alongside cell therapies like CAR-T in solid tumors. That's where we think the field is heading: combinatorial platforms, not isolated assets.
The AI inflection point
A second conviction sits underneath the biology: AI has moved from narrative to infrastructure in drug discovery. In 2025, AI-driven drug discovery drew around $11 billion across 348 financings — a real reallocation of capital toward computation-native biotech. The winners won't treat AI as an efficiency layer bolted onto an old process; they'll build companies where computation changes what kinds of biology can be designed in the first place. That matters most in complex, engineered modalities like OVs, where iteration speed and design quality compound into real advantage.
India's biotech story
The third part of our thesis is geography. India is emerging as one of the most underrated places in the world to build advanced therapeutics — combining scientific talent, manufacturing depth, improving regulation, and a cost structure that matters enormously in cell and gene therapy. NexCAR19 made that visible: India's first approved CAR-T therapy, cleared in October 2023, developed and manufactured locally at far lower cost than Western equivalents. For investors, that's not a side issue — manufacturing economics decide whether a therapy stays niche science or becomes medicine at scale.
Nucleovir sits at the intersection of all three shifts: oncolytic viruses maturing into a real modality, AI-native biological design, and India's emergence as a serious place to build advanced therapeutics. And it isn't a concept-stage story — the platform already has lead candidates in animal validation studies. For a field that rewards teams who connect ambitious science to real execution early, that's exactly the right posture.
The team
What gave us confidence was the founders' fit to the problem. Yogesh brings a background unusually aligned with where the company is going: doctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, postdoctoral research at KAUST, and firsthand exposure to the translational promise of advanced therapeutics before founding Nucleovir in September 2024. Ayush brings a rare mix of quantitative and biological depth, with research spanning genomics, developmental biology, aging, and host-pathogen biology across institutions like Caltech, Harvard, and McMaster. And Sunil adds operating experience in biologics and vaccine manufacturing — exactly the kind of execution layer advanced therapeutics companies need far earlier than most founders expect.
Together, that's a team that understands both the scientific complexity of the problem and the discipline required to build in an AI-native way.
The bet
The next generation of oncology leaders will be defined by three things: serious biological engineering, the judgment to combine modalities precisely, and capital efficiency from day one. That's exactly what we see in Nucleovir. With this round, the team will scale its AI-bio platform and push its lead candidate toward the clinic.
We're proud to back them.
Speciale Invest is an early-stage deep tech venture fund based in India.
