Following news in the UK in early November that a one-year-old baby girl with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL ) has been put into remission by UCART19, an unapproved therapy that required special permission to use, Laboratoires Servier acquired exclusive worldwide rights to the product and promptly did a deal with Pfizer Inc for the drug’s potential commercialisation.
A new venture capital company with financial backing from the European Investment Fund (EIF) has been launched in Belgium to support start-up and early-stage life science companies in Europe. V-Bio Ventures has raised €63 million in the first closing of its first fund.
Faron Pharmaceuticals Oy of Finland has raised £10 million gross on the AIM market in London in order to help finance a Phase 3 trial of its agent for acute respiratory distress syndrome Traumakine, a recombinant human interferon beta-1a product.
Kuros Biosurgery AG, a Swiss developer of biomaterials, has topped up a CHF 15 million (€13.89 million) financing round that closed for the first time in August, with an additional CHF 5 million from undisclosed investors.
A syndicate of investors co-led by New Science Ventures LLC of the US is to provide €8 million to Ovizio Imaging Systems, a Belgium-based medical device company that has technology for the real-time three dimensional imaging of living cells.
Germany-based Curetis BV has raised €40 million in an initial public offering of its shares on the Euronext exchanges in Amsterdam and Brussels for the commercialisation of its molecular diagnostic system for serious infectious diseases.
Germany-based Probiodrug AG has increased its share capital by 10% or €13.5 million in order to finance further development of its treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The private share placement follows an initial public offering of the company’s shares in late 2014 that raised €23.2 million.
NightstaRx Ltd, a 2014 spinout from the University of Oxford, has raised $35 million in a Series B financing round to further develop a candidate gene therapy for choroideremia, an inherited form of progressive blindness.
AstraZeneca Plc has taken steps to shore up its portfolio of drugs for cardiovascular and metabolic disease with the agreed acquisition of ZS Pharma Inc of the US which has a product under review at the Food and Drug Administration for treating hyperkalaemia.
BioNTech AG, a German company with messenger RNA technology suitable for human therapeutics, has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Sanofi SA to discover and develop up to five cancer immunotherapies.