Finance, Grants, Deals

MorphoSys AG has increased its share capital with the issue of 1,337,552 new ordinary shares to a subsidiary of Royalty Pharma Plc as part of a long-term financial partnership that is enabling the German company to acquire Constellation Pharmaceuticals Inc of the US. The share deal will generate $100 million for MorphoSys and give Royalty Pharma Investments 3.9% of the German company’s registered share capital. MorphoSys completed the acquisition of Constellation on 15 July, giving it one of the first US companies to develop drugs in the field of epigenetics.

A new biotech company co-located in Denmark and Belgium, has been launched with €60 million in Series A funding to investigate potential small molecule therapies for neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease. Muna Therapeutics draws on the expertise of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark and KU Leuven in Belgium. Early entrepreneurial support was provided by Novo Seeds, a unit of the Novo Holdings A/S investment group.

A US company developing models of cancer tumours derived from the tissues of actual patients has received $70 million in Series A financing in order to advance its diagnostic technology. Xilis Inc of Durham, North Carolina has taken the concept of the organoid, a miniaturised organ, and adapted it to oncology. The financing was led by Mubadala Capital with participation by the new investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Life Sciences Partners (LSP) as well as existing investors.

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.