Finance, Grants, Deals

Ablynx NV has announced that its private placement of shares was oversubscribed with the result that it raised €31.5 million by way of an accelerated bookbuilding procedure announced on 27 February.

Ablynx NV has announced plans for a capital increase of around €20 million through a private placement of shares with institutional investors. The price of the shares will be set via an accelerated book-building process.

Glide Pharma Ltd has completed a fifth funding round raising £14 million to scale up manufacturing for the production of its solid dose injector system which includes drug product and device. The new round brings funds raised to date to £24.9 million.

Sapiens Steering Brain Stimulation BV of the Netherlands and Germany, has raised €7.5 million from a Dutch investment group in an extension of its Series A financing round. The new funds supplement €16.5 million raised earlier from European and US backers.

A potential $6.6 billion bid for Elan Corp was made 25 February by a private New York investment firm called Royalty Pharma LLC and potentially rejected by Elan’s board of directors.

Ablynx NV is to jointly research the potential of its therapeutic proteins conjugated to cytotoxic drugs developed by Spirogen Ltd, in a new research agreement announced by both parties on 25 February. The research collaboration is set to last for up to one year initially with an option to continue.

The UK-based drug discovery company Domainex Ltd has announced plans to raise £1.5 million in new capital to support its kinase-based drug development programmes for cancer and a variety of inflammatory diseases. The round is being led by Longbow Capital LLP.

UCB SA has signed an agreement with US-based ConfometRX Inc to discover new drugs to treat neurological diseases by targeting the G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) family of proteins. GPCRs are the largest family of signaling proteins in the human genome.

Sphere Fluidics Ltd of the UK, which has developed technology to analyse single cells, has raised $2.5 million in a Series A round from a syndicate led by 24Haymarket of London. The company’s technology comes from the chemistry department of Cambridge University.

MorphoSys AG and Heptares Therapeutics Ltd have entered into a collaboration to generate candidate antibody therapeutics targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The disease targets will be proposed by MorphoSys.