BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - Domantis Ltd. raised £17 million (US$30.7 million) in an oversubscribed third round and achieved what is nowadays a rare feat, securing a 29 percent increase in value compared to the previous round.

New investors in the domain antibody company - Novo Nordisk AS, of Bagsvaerd, Denmark, and MC Life Sciences Ventures, the investment arm of Mitsubishi Corp., of Tokyo - joined existing investors 3i Group plc, of London; Gray Ghost LLC, of Baltimore; Albany Ventures, of London; and Peptech Ltd., of Sydney, Australia. Novo Nordisk invested $8 million.

"We're on the way to building a $1 billion company here," Bob Connelly, CEO, told BioWorld International. "There's no longer any doubt that antibody products are great products. There is huge ambition for [Domantis] among the founders and new investors."

A week earlier, Cambridge, UK-based Domantis announced its largest licensing deal to date with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., of New York, worth $9.2 million in up front and research payments, plus $20 million per product up to commercialization.

Connelly said investors' enthusiasm for the third round funding was separate from doing the BMS deal. "All the investors decided in June this year they wanted to reinvest, so we decided to see what we could raise internally and then open up to a small group of strategic investors," he said.

That enabled Connelly to shorten to five months a process that he expected to take a year. "And it hasn't taken every moment of my time, either," he said.

The price increase is a reflection of the progress Domantis has made since its founding in 2000. With the latest round, the company has raised $83 million. "The increase in valuation has to do with where we are and where we have come from," Connelly said. "All the investors believe we have made great progress."

DAbs are the smallest functional units of antibodies, weighing in at 90 percent less than their conventional counterparts, and have the ability to hit a wider range of targets. That extra flexibility was highlighted by data presented last week on dual-targeting domain antibodies. Speaking at the International Conference on Antibody Engineering in San Diego, Domantis' chief scientific officer and co-founder, Ian Tomlinson, described dAbs that can bind to two different tumor antigens. Healthy cells that express just one, or neither, of the antigens aren't affected.

Domantis has experimented in using dual-targeting dAbs to deliver a variety of chemotherapeutics. It has initiated three proprietary programs in multiple myeloma, small-cell lung cancer and colorectal cancer. The lead products are about to enter preclinical evaluation.

While Novo Nordisk's portion is a straight investment deal, Connelly said he is confident it will be "the start of a good relationship." Similarly, there is no formal agreement to work with Mitsubishi, but Connelly believes it will help Domantis establish credentials in Japan.

The company now has sufficient cash to take several products through to proof of concept in humans. "It will be a while before we have to think about financing again - and hopefully when we do, that will be going public," Connelly said.