Finance, Grants, Deals

AC Immune SA is to acquire a candidate vaccine and other assets to treat Parkinson’s disease in a strategic move to broaden its portfolio of drugs for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The Switzerland-based company already has a portfolio of candidate drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. The acquisition – from Affiris AG of Austria – will give it a vaccine for Parkinson’s disease which has been validated in a Phase 1 clinical trial.

Artios Pharma Ltd, which is building a portfolio of small molecule drugs designed to kill cancer cells by blocking their ability to repair damaged DNA, has raised $153 million in a Series C financing round. The company is preparing to take a compound targeting DNA polymerase theta (Pol theta) into clinical development before the end of the year. Pol theta is an enzyme that plays a role in the proliferation of certain cancer cells but which is not necessary for normal cell growth.

GHO Capital Partners LLP, a specialist healthcare investor located in London, UK, has closed its third fund, raising more than €2 billion in capital for investment. The company invests broadly, providing money to enterprises in the medical device and technology sectors, biopharmaceutical enterprises, and companies delivering services to patients.

A UK company with technology for delivering peptides to the cytosol of cells, has raised £6.2 million in seed financing to investigate the application of its technology across a range of therapies. The financing was co-led by incoming investor Octopus Ventures and existing investor M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA. NanoSyrinx was founded in 2020 by Joseph Healey, Nicholas Waterfield and Alexia Hapeshi to commercialise research conducted at the University of Warwick’s Medical School.

MorphoSys AG has increased its share capital with the issue of 1,337,552 new ordinary shares to a subsidiary of Royalty Pharma Plc as part of a long-term financial partnership that is enabling the German company to acquire Constellation Pharmaceuticals Inc of the US. The share deal will generate $100 million for MorphoSys and give Royalty Pharma Investments 3.9% of the German company’s registered share capital. MorphoSys completed the acquisition of Constellation on 15 July, giving it one of the first US companies to develop drugs in the field of epigenetics.

A new biotech company co-located in Denmark and Belgium, has been launched with €60 million in Series A funding to investigate potential small molecule therapies for neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease. Muna Therapeutics draws on the expertise of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark and KU Leuven in Belgium. Early entrepreneurial support was provided by Novo Seeds, a unit of the Novo Holdings A/S investment group.

A US company developing models of cancer tumours derived from the tissues of actual patients has received $70 million in Series A financing in order to advance its diagnostic technology. Xilis Inc of Durham, North Carolina has taken the concept of the organoid, a miniaturised organ, and adapted it to oncology. The financing was led by Mubadala Capital with participation by the new investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Life Sciences Partners (LSP) as well as existing investors.

Two European companies have decided to combine their expertise to develop a candidate gene therapy for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare protein deficiency that can cause swelling in multiple parts of the body. Pharming Group NV, which already has an HAE product on the market, is to pay Orchard Therapeutics Plc for rights to a preclinical gene therapy programme for the same disease. The therapy, OTL-105, is an investigational ex vivo autologous haematopoietic stem cell therapy delivered with a lentiviral vector.

A new regenerative medicines company deploying regulatory T cells as potential therapies was launched in the US on 23 June with a Series A financing of $95 million. Abata Therapeutics plans to treat patients with severe autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, starting with non-relapsing multiple sclerosis, a disease for which there are no approved therapies. The Series A funding was provided by a syndicate led by Third Rock Ventures. Other investors included the biotech company ElevateBio LLC and the charity Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Intellia Therapeutics Inc has announced gross proceeds of about $600 million from a public offering of its shares on the US Nasdaq market. The offering consisted of 4.1 million shares which were priced at $145 per share on 29 June. The underwriters have also been granted a 30-day option to buy additional stock.