Adcendo ApS, a Danish company founded in 2017 to develop antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) technology, has raised €51 million in a Series A financing – the largest Series A round for a Danish biotech company. Adcendo is developing ADCs directed against a cell surface receptor which is understood to be overexpressed on several non-epithelial cancers including sarcomas, glioblastomas and subsets of acute myeloid leukaemia. Expression is restricted in healthy individuals.
A new biotech company has been launched in the UK to develop medicines for cancer and inflammatory disease by targeting fibroblasts. Mestag Therapeutics Ltd was founded by a team of five fibroblast experts and has received seed financing of $11 million from SV Health Investors and Johnson & Johnson Innovation.
A German radiopharmaceutical company has raised €90 million to complete development and commercialise a radionuclide therapy for cancer as well as build its oncology pipeline. ITM Isotopen Technologien München AG is conducting a Phase 3 trial of Lu-Edotreotide in patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours, which are rare tumours of the pancreas and parts of the gastrointestinal tract.
Anavo Therapeutics BV, a new venture capital-backed company, has been launched in the Netherlands with seed capital of €20 million to investigate the development of drugs targeting phosphatases. Phosphatases are enzymes which, together with kinases, regulate the activity of signalling pathways in the body. But until recently, they have been largely unexplored as a target for therapeutics.
Forbion Capital Partners has announced the final close of a new fund which will invest in late-stage European assets developing therapies for high medical need. The Forbion Growth Opportunities Fund I closed at €360 million, having only been launched in July 2020. Investors included Pantheon Ventures, the European Investment Fund, and Eli Lilly and Co, amongst others.
Alchemab Therapeutics Ltd of the UK has raised £60 million in a Series A round to advance a drug discovery platform that involves identifying naturally protective antibodies in individuals who show unexpected resistance to disease. The financing round was led by RA Capital Management, with participation from five other investors including SV Health Investors and the Dementia Discovery Fund.
Vaccitech Plc, co-inventor of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid-19, has has made a regulatory filing in the US for an initial public offering of its shares on the Nasdaq market. The size of the offering had not been decided as of 11 April, but investors were reportedly looking for a valuation of around $700 million taking into account the wide distribution of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine and its portfolio of other prophylactic as well as therapeutic vaccines.
Sanofi SA expanded its portfolio of new technologies with the acquisition on 9 April of the US preclinical stage biotech company Tidal Therapeutics which has developed an approach for reprogramming immune cells in vivo using messenger RNA (mRNA). “We anticipate that this next generation, off-the-shelf approach, has the potential to bring CAR T cell therapy to a much broader patient population,” said Frank Nestle, Sanofi’s chief scientific officer, in a prepared statement.
Allcyte GmbH of Austria has raised $6 million in seed financing to advance its artificial intelligence (AI) platform selecting treatments for late-stage blood cancers. The financing round was led by 42cap, Air Street capital, PUSH Ventures, Amino Collective and VP venture Partners. It follows results from a clinical trial which showed that the company’s real-time analysis of live tissue from cancer patients identified treatments for these patients that proved to be effective in 55% of cases.
A special purpose acquisition company, known colloquially as a blank cheque company, has been launched by Life Sciences Partners (LSP) of the Netherlands, the first such company to focus exclusively on European biotech. Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are proliferating on Wall Street, fuelled by low interest rates and a demand from investors for innovative assets.