Finance, Grants, Deals

Exscientia Ltd has enlisted the support of one of the world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock Inc, to support its expansion in artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery. Funds managed by BlackRock joined the company’s Series C investment round in early March, bringing total proceeds to the UK company up to $100 million.

UK-based Oxular Ltd has secured $37 million in venture finance to advance its lead product for diabetic macular edema (DME) into Phase 2 as well as support earlier stage ophthalmologic products. The venture capital firm Forbion led the financing, which included existing investors IP Group, NeoMed and V-Bio Ventures.

Merck & Co Inc is to acquire Pandion Therapeutics Inc, a clinical-stage biotechnology company with candidate products designed to treat autoimmune diseases. Merck will tender $60 in cash for each share of the company, representing a deal value of $1.85 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2021.

UCB SA of Belgium and Microsoft Corp have entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration to use UCB’s medicinal capabilities and artificial intelligence from Microsoft to discover new drugs. The collaboration builds on work the two companies have already done as part of the Covid Moonshot project, an international effort to develop an antiviral treatment for Covid-19. Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

In just 12 years – the time it takes to develop a new chemical entity – argenx NV has grown from Dutch start-up into an internationally recognised biopharma enterprise. The company has a portfolio of wholly-owned and partnered antibody therapeutics, the first of which has been submitted for review to the US Food and Drug Administration. On 5 February, it announced gross proceeds of $1.15 billion from a global share offering, managed by J.P. Morgan and three other leading US financial institutions.

Less than a year after signing a lucrative licensing deal with Eli Lilly and Co, UK-based Evox Therapeutics Ltd has completed a Series C financing round to advance therapeutics based on exosomes into the clinic. The £69.2 million financing was led by Redmile Group, a US hedge fund, which was joined by the new investors OrbiMed Healthcare Fund Management and the Invus Group LLC.

The Medicxi investment group has launched Centessa Pharmaceuticals Ltd, a new pharmaceutical company that brings together a group of diverse assets in order to develop them at scale with oversight from experts in the field. The launch marks a new stage in the Medicxi investment model that focuses on developing new drugs from single assets with a minimum of infrastructure in order to increase productivity and improve the return on investment.

Imcyse SA has raised an additional €21.3 million in Series B financing in order to advance its pipeline of immunotherapy compounds and simultaneously brought Pfizer Inc on board as a shareholder. Earlier, Imcyse announced a licensing deal with Pfizer to develop a preclinical asset for rheumatoid arthritis.

Novartis and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to work together to develop an in vivo gene therapy for sickle cell disease, one of the oldest known and most common genetic disorders. The project will pool the Swiss company’s drug discovery expertise with the Gates Foundation’s charitable healthcare mission. A therapy developed by the collaboration would be distributed to low and middle-income countries.

A spin-out from the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands has raised seed funding to discover and develop new T cell therapies for solid tumours including triple negative breast cancer. The company, Pan Cancer T BV, will be investigating T cell therapies which have been equipped with new receptors enabling them to target specific cancer antigens. The group of therapies is known as T cell receptor (TCR) T cells.