CureVac GmbH, which is developing therapeutic vaccines against cancer, has raised €27.6 million from dievini Hopp BioTech holding GmbH, the investment company of Dietmar Hopp. The company has a compound for prostate cancer in Phase 2a.
The US National Institutes of Health have awarded $3.4 million to GlycoVaxyn AG of Switzerland and a researcher at the Harvard Medical School to carry out preclinical work on a new S. aureus vaccine for hospital-acquired infections.
Affimed Therapeutics AG of Germany has raised €20 million in a Series C round to bring it antibody candidate for Hodgkin’s lymphoma into the clinic and develop its pipeline. The round was led by existing investors including Novo Nordisk A/S.
Bicycle Therapeutics Ltd, which is developing a new peptide technology, has completed its seed funding round having raised new money from SR One, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, and SV Life Sciences. The sums were not disclosed.
MorphoSys AG has confirmed that it expects to report revenue of between €89 to €93 million in 2010, up from €81 million in 2009, and to report an operating profit of €5 to €9 million, compared with €11.4 million the previous year.
Companies looking to partner or licence a medical product or platform often have difficulty working out what the value is of what they are selling. If their product or platform is really new, there is no precedent for establishing value.
Celgene Corp has agreed to pay the privately-held Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc of Cambridge, Massachusetts $130 million upfront, including an equity investment, for access to Agios’s cancer metabolism research platform.
The Roche group has announced plans to acquire Medingo Ltd, a company which is developing a semi-disposable insulin patch pump for diabetics. Roche will pay $160 million upfront as well as up to 25% of this amount in performance milestones.
Life Technologies Corp of California has acquired 58% of the gene synthesis company, Geneart AG, paving the way for a public tender of the remaining shares. Life Technologies will offer €13.75 per share for the rest of the German company.
The Swiss molecular diagnostics company, Biocartis SA, has raised €30 million in a Series B financing round which was supported by the new investors, Johnson & Johnson Development Corp and the Debiopharm Group.