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Coronado, around since 2006, recently came out of stealth mode in a rather dramatic fashion. On July 6, it revealed it had raised $25.8 million in a funding round led by National Securities Corp., following a $21.6 million private round in November.

Last week, Coronado filed a Form 10 with the SEC to become a public reporting company, the first step in the process of entering the public markets.

That will make financing Coronado easier, says chief executive Bobby Sandage. “We don’t intend to partner our products, so we will need to raise more money,’’ he says.

The decision not to seek Big Pharma partners may seem bold; many cash-strapped biotechs need all the help they can get. But Sandage and his team of seven are confident their two experimental treatments, CNDO-201 and an anti-cancer molecule called CNDO-109, are so promising they can afford to handle the research themselves, and hold onto all the profits.

While the two drugs may seem quite different, they’re similar in that they take an immunotherapeutic approach to combating disease. By harnessing NK cells, CNDO-109 follows a well-known technique for fighting cancer. But drugs generally used to activate NK cells are toxic. So Coronado is developing a way to remove NK cells from family members of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, activate the cells in a test tube, and infuse them back into the patient.

In a trial with seven patients at University College London Business, which developed the molecule, remission times were lengthened and patients suffered few side effects, Sandage says. Coronado plans to file an IND early next year to study the drug in AML. The treatment has also shown early promise in breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer, as well as in multiple myeloma, he says.