Finance, Grants, Deals

AstraZeneca Plc has entered into a research collaboration and exclusive licensing deal with Transgene SA of France to co-develop five oncolytic virus drug candidates for the treatment of cancer. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Cambridge Innovation Capital Plc is leading an investment group that includes Genentech to provide seed capital to promising life science and healthcare companies in the UK and elsewhere. The seed capital will be issued by a new business accelerator called Start Codon located in Cambridge, UK.

Hookipa Pharma Inc has priced its initial public share offering on the US Nasdaq market at $14 per share to raise a gross $84 million, excluding any exercise of the underwriters’options. The proceeds will finance the company’s portfolio of immunotherapies targeting infectious diseases and cancers.

Catalent Inc, a service provider for the biotech industry, is to pay $1.2 billion to acquire Paragon Bioservices Inc a company with expertise in adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors for gene therapy. The New Jersey, US-based company said it expects the market for gene therapies to grow by 25% in the coming years.

The Dutch cell therapy company Kiadis Pharma NV has taken steps to strengthen its presence in the haematopoietic stem cell transplant sector with the agreed takeover of CytoSen Therapeutics Inc. The all-share transaction includes an upfront payment in stock as well as milestone payments contingent on the achievement of six clinical development and regulatory goals. CytoSen’s lead asset is a natural killer (NK) cell product designed to enable patients to receive a stem cell transplant from haploidentical donors. It is due to enter clinical development in 2020.

On the heels of a regulatory approval, Nanobiotix SA has raised €29.5 million in a private share placement to continue the clinical development of its radioenhancer products for the treatment of cancer. The placement was oversubscribed during an accelerated bookbuilding process. Both existing and new investors from the US and Europe supported the offering.

The ReNeuron Group Plc has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with a subsidiary of the Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical (Group) Co Ltd of China for the development, manufacture and commercialisation of its two allogeneic cell lines which underpin the UK company’s candidate cell therapies for neurological disorders and diseases of the retina.

Germany’s Medigene AG has secured a licensing and collaboration deal with a new Asian biotech which will develop and commercialise its prospective T cell immunotherapies in China, South Korea and Japan. The new company, Cytovant Sciences, has been launched by Roivant Sciences Ltd of Switzerland and Sinovant Sciences in China.

The Dutch biotech, Synaffix BV has secured a deal in China that expands the use of its conjugation technology for antibody-drug conjugates (ADC), while generating income of up to $125 million. Announced on 10 April, the agreement will give Shanghai Miracogen Inc non-exclusive rights to two of Synaffix’s proprietary technologies. One is a conjugation technology that exploits the native glycan for the attachment of a toxic payload to an antibody; the other uses polar spacer technology to link the antibody to a cargo.

With public health authorities increasingly vigilant about another influenza pandemic, the European Commission and 15 EU member states have signed contracts with Seqirus UK Ltd for the supply of influenza vaccines that might be used in an emergency. Announcing the deal on 8 April, the company said the pandemic contracts are the first to be executed under a new EU joint procurement framework. Financial terms were not disclosed.