Finance, Grants, Deals

A consortium of predominately European investors is providing €47 million to Dynacure SAS of France to bring its candidate antisense oligonucleotide drug into the clinic for the treatment of patients with centronuclear myopathies.

Centronuclear myopathies are genetic disorders characterised by muscle weakness and wasting in the skeletal muscles. Dynacure’s lead product, Dyn101, is intended to treat these disorders by targeting dynamin 2, a protein that is implicated in cell processes such and cell motility and endocytosis.

Novartis is proposing to spin off its Alcon division into a separately listed eye care devices company leaving it to focus on pharmaceutical discovery and development. The transaction will be put to shareholders for a vote in February 2019 and if approved, would be completed by 30 June of that year.

UK-based NodThera Ltd has raised £28 million in Series A financing to develop small molecule drugs to treat diseases driven by chronic inflammation. The financing was co-led by Sofinnova Partners and 5AM Ventures with further participation by Epidarex Capital and F-Prime Capital Partners.

Belgium-based iTeos Therapeutics SA has raised $75 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing round to advance two of its immunotherapy candidates into the clinic and open a new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

The funding was led by MPM Capital with participation from the additional new investors HBM Partners, 6 Dimensions Capital and  Curative Ventures. All of the company’s existing investors also participated in the round.

Emulate Inc, the developer of micro-engineered chips that mimic that activity of live human organs, has raised $36 million in a Series C financing round to finance the expansion of its organs-on-chips technology that is being used by the pharma industry to test candidate drugs for safety and predict efficacy.

Roche and Foundation Medicine Inc reached a definitive merger agreement on 19 June enabling the Swiss multinational to acquire shares of the US molecular information company that it does not already own.

Roche is to buy the shares at $137 per share in cash giving a total transaction value of $2.4 billion and a total company value of $5.3 billion. This represents a premium of 29% to Foundation Medicine’s closing stock market price on 18 June and a premium of 47% and 68% to the 30-day and 90-day volume weighted average share price on the same day.

A short 18 months after its launch as a new company, Microbiotica Ltd has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, to discover, develop and commercialise biomarkers, targets and medicines for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Microbiotica was spun out of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2016 to research the  human microbiome, a term used to describe the genomes of microorganisms in the gut, including at least 1,000 species of bacteria.

Hookipa Biotech AG has signed a licencing deal with Gilead Sciences Inc giving the US company exclusive rights to its technology platform to develop vaccines targeting the  hepatitis B and the human immunodeficiency viruses. The agreement brings Austria-based Hookipa into a closer alliance with Gilead which invested an undisclosed amount of money in Hookipa’s €50 million Series C investment round in December 2017.

AstraZeneca Plc announced on 7 May that it will divest its legacy neuroscience product Seroquel by way of a sale to Luye Pharma Group Ltd, a Chinese investment holding company. The sale is part of AstraZeneca’s strategy of lightening up its portfolio to focus on three core therapy areas.

The core areas are oncology; treatments for cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases; and treatments for respiratory diseases. Seroquel was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2007; it started losing its patent protection in 2012.

Germany’s Medigene AG has raised €32.3 million in an oversubscribed private placement enabling it to expanded its ongoing clinical programme of prospective products for cancer using T cell receptor modified T cells.

The company issued 2.2 million new shares from its authorised capital on 24 May, representing approximately 10% of its outstanding share capital. The financing will increase the total number of registered shares of the company to 24,544,595.