A French start-up company with assets in-licensed from Sanofi SA has raised €12 million in seed financing to discover potential drugs for heart failure. Corteria Pharmaceuticals SAS will use data from subpopulations of patients with cardiovascular disease to identify targets for new therapies.
A venture capital company backed by Swedish and Danish institutions has closed its first fund at €122.3 million. Designed to support promising life science companies in the Nordic region, Eir Ventures I AB has already invested in nine companies, two of which have completed initial public offerings (IPOs) on the US Nasdaq market.
The Roche Group has established a partnership with a drug discovery company in Salt Lake City, US to identify novel targets for new neurology drugs and for one indication in oncology. The partner, Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc, has technology for searching large biological and chemical datasets for information on biological relationships, particularly in neuroscience.
A new immunotherapy company has been launched in the UK, based on science conducted by Caetano Reis e Sousa and colleagues at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Adendra Therapeutics Ltd will research candidate drugs for the treatment of solid cancers and T cell-based autoimmune disorders by exploiting dendritic cell biology.
Celyad Oncology SA, a Belgian cell therapy developer, has made a private share placement with an affiliate of the Fortress Investment Group, raising $32.5 million to help support its operations into the first half of 2023. The placement involved 6.5 million ordinary shares and was arranged by SVB Leerink.
The board of Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB (Sobi) has said the withdrawal of a takeover bid by a private equity consortium won’t change the company’s strategic objective of becoming a global leader in rare diseases. The statement, issued on 3 December, follows an announcement by the consortium that it was cancelling its $8.1 billion tender offer for the Swedish company after only 87.3% of shareholders accepted it. The consortium was looking to buy more than 90% of Sobi’s outstanding shares.
Belgium-based UCB SA has negotiated a partnership with Novartis to co-develop a small molecule treatment for Parkinson’s disease which it in-licenced in 2014 from Neuropore Therapeutics Inc. The candidate treatment, UCB0599, targets alpha-synuclein, a key protein involved in the disease’s pathology. The compound is currently in a Phase 2 study in patients with early-stage disease.
Vifor Pharma Group has expanded its presence in nephrology with the acquisition of two companies with therapies addressing specific aspects of vascular calcification. The companies are Sanifit Therapeutics SA of Spain and Inositec AG of Switzerland.
A cell therapy company launched by Syncona Ltd in 2019 has completed an oversubscribed Series B financing round to start the clinical development of a compound to prevent organ rejection in liver transplant patients. Quell Therapeutics Ltd raised $156 million from a consortia co-led by Jeito Capital, Ridgeback Capital Investments, SV Health Investors and Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC. Syncona also participated in the round.
Quell is developing engineered T regulatory (Treg) cells as therapies.
Finland-based Valo Therapeutics Oy has raised €11 million in an over-subscribed financing round to support a first clinical trial of it lead cancer drug – an antigen-coated oncolytic virus. The financing, announced on 15 November, was led by the corporate advisory firm Ironside Capital. Existing investor Freeman Road Pty Ltd participated in the round as did new investor MMJ Group Holdings of Australia. The round is being described as a prelude to an initial public share offering.