Finance, Grants, Deals

Two European companies have decided to combine their expertise to develop a candidate gene therapy for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare protein deficiency that can cause swelling in multiple parts of the body. Pharming Group NV, which already has an HAE product on the market, is to pay Orchard Therapeutics Plc for rights to a preclinical gene therapy programme for the same disease. The therapy, OTL-105, is an investigational ex vivo autologous haematopoietic stem cell therapy delivered with a lentiviral vector.

A new regenerative medicines company deploying regulatory T cells as potential therapies was launched in the US on 23 June with a Series A financing of $95 million. Abata Therapeutics plans to treat patients with severe autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, starting with non-relapsing multiple sclerosis, a disease for which there are no approved therapies. The Series A funding was provided by a syndicate led by Third Rock Ventures. Other investors included the biotech company ElevateBio LLC and the charity Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Intellia Therapeutics Inc has announced gross proceeds of about $600 million from a public offering of its shares on the US Nasdaq market. The offering consisted of 4.1 million shares which were priced at $145 per share on 29 June. The underwriters have also been granted a 30-day option to buy additional stock.

Blackstone Life Sciences has put its financial muscle behind a start-up company that plans to develop allogeneic CAR T cell therapies for cancer. The US private equity group is committing $250 million to the venture, which will use T cells that have been engineered to express a universal chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) against tumour antigens. The T cells will be derived from healthy donors rather than from the patients themselves. They can also be silenced in order to avoid cytokine release syndrome.

uniQure NV is to acquire a France-based gene therapy company whose lead programme is a prospective treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common form of focal epilepsy. Corlieve Therapeutics SAS has been working on prospective therapies for neurological disorders since its founding in late 2019.

ViiV Healthcare is to make an upfront payment of $40 million to Halozyme Therapeutics Inc of the US to gain access to a drug delivery technology enabling medicines for HIV to be administered in larger quantities and at longer dosing intervals. The agreement was announced on 22 June by ViiV, which is majority controlled by GlaxoSmithKline Plc. Its new licence will give the company exclusive use of Halozyme’s technology for four specific HIV medicine targets.

Stratatech Corp, a unit of Dublin, Ireland-based Mallinckrodt Plc, has received regulatory approval in the US for its treatment for thermal burns. The treatment, StrataGraft, is produced from two types of human skin cells, keratinocytes and dermal fibroblasts, which have been grown together to make a cellularised scaffold. It is a topical treatment, to be placed onto the burn by a healthcare provider.

Flagship Pioneering, a US venture capital company founded by Noubar Afeyan, an Armenian-American entrepreneur, has closed its newest fund at $3.4 billion. Fund VII was reopened in April to current limited partners and new investors, and has now raised an additional $2.23 billion. This will enable the company to consolidate its work in company creation and development under one investment vehicle.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has entered a new oncology pact in order to complete a group of assets that target receptors transmitting signals to immune cells. The collaboration is with iTeos Therapeutics of Belgium which was founded in 2011 to explore the tumour microenvironment and immunosuppressive pathways that affect cancer.

A new gene therapy company based in the Netherlands has raised €31 million in seed financing to advance a preclinical portfolio of potential treatments for muscular and neurodegenerative disorders. VectorY Therapeutics BV was launched in October 2020 to develop vectorised antibodies using an adeno-associated virus vector platform and antibody-based targeted degradation technologies.