Finance, Grants, Deals

France-based Eyevensys SA has raised $12 million from a syndicate led by Korea Investment Partners to accelerate development of its preclinical programme, EYS809, for treating wet age-related macular degeneration. The Series B round extension was also supported by existing investors. The Eyevensys technology is a non-viral gene therapy delivery platform that uses an electrotransfection system to deliver DNA plasmids encoding therapeutic proteins into the eye.

Two US biotech companies have launched a new partnership in order to use gene editing to develop medicines for multiple diseases including Type 1 diabetes. Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc, known for its work in cystic fibrosis, and Arbor Biotechnologies Inc, a genetic disease specialist, will used Crispr gene editing technology to develop ex vivo engineered cell therapies. The new partnership, announced on 24 August, builds on a collaboration established in 2018.

The Roche Group has entered into a collaboration and licensing agreement with Shape Therapeutics Inc of Seattle, US giving it access to an RNA editing technology that reportedly has promise for neurological disorders. Shape was founded in 2018, and since then has raised $147.5 million in Series A and Series B financing rounds. The deal with Roche, announced on 24 August, could generate as much as $3 billion in milestone payments for Shape should the collaboration yield marketable products.

Pfizer Inc is expanding its presence in oncology with the acquisition of Trillium Therapeutics Inc, a Canadian company with a pipeline of early-stage therapies for treating haematological malignancies and solid tumours. The company’s two lead products target CD47, a molecule that tumours use to evade the immune system.

The European Commission has approved funding from the Danish government to Bavarian Nordic A/S to support the company’s development of a vaccine for Covid-19. The funding will take the form of a repayable advance. The candidate vaccine, ABNCoV2, was developed by AdaptVac, a joint venture spun out of the University of Copenhagen, and licensed to Bavarian Nordic in July 2020. It uses AdaptVac’s viral capsid-like virus particle technology.

A bidding contest between Philip Morris and Carlyle, a private equity firm, for ownership of Vectura Group Plc has ended with the cigarette company winning control of the UK pharma group. On 12 August, the Vectura board accepted a final offer from Philip Morris of 165 pence per share to acquire the company, giving a total enterprise value of £1.1 billion.

Mission Therapeutics Ltd has reached an important threshold in a three-year old collaboration with AbbVie Inc aimed at degrading the toxic proteins in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The event was the selection of two enzyme targets for the development of new small molecule drugs for these diseases, which are the most common neurological disorders worldwide. It triggered a $20 million milestone payment to Mission, announced on 9 August.

H. Lundbeck A/S has entered a collaboration with a US start-up company specialising in small molecules that target RNA, as part of a drive to expand its portfolio of medicines for central nervous system disorders. The collaboration is with Rgenta Therapeutics Inc of Cambridge, Mass, US, which has technology for identifying regulatory sites in RNA that are amenable for modulation by small molecules.

A bidding contest between Philip Morris and Carlyle, a private equity firm, for ownership of the UK pharma company Vectura Group Plc has taken an unexpected turn. Vectura’s board of directors has received a higher offer for the company from Carlyle and has announced plans to recommend that shareholders approve it. This comes just a month after the board recommended an offer from Philip Morris International, which in turn had outbid an earlier offer from Carlyle.

Bayer AG has expanded its oncology portfolio with the acquisition of Vividion Therapeutics Inc of the US and its proprietary drug discovery platform. Vividion’s technology involves identifying previously unknown pockets on well-validated protein targets implicated in a wide range of diseases. The company’s lead programmes are small molecule drugs targeting NRF2 mutant cancers as well as NRF2 activators for a number of inflammatory diseases. NRF2 is a protein that helps regulate the work of antioxidant proteins that protect against oxidative damage.