LONDON – Merck KGaA has increased the size of its corporate venture fund M Ventures to €600 million (US$676.4 million), to be invested over the next five years. This is the third increase in the financial commitment to the evergreen fund following its formation as Merck Serono Ventures in 2009, with €40 million. Since then, it has backed more than 80 companies. The larger fund will allow M Ventures to further grow the number and the size of its investments but, said Hakan Goker, managing director of M Ventures, “We will not change the strategy per se.”
Life sciences VC Apple Tree Partners has launched its first U.K.-based portfolio company, providing $53 million in series A funding for immunology specialist Adendra Therapeutics Ltd.
LONDON – Europe’s latest antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) specialist, Emergence Therapeutics AG, will be going head to head with pioneer Seagen Inc.’s approved ADC, Padcev, after raising €87 million (US$97.9 million) in a series A round.
Odyssey Therapeutics Inc. launched with a whopping $218 million series A round, the year’s second-largest, to fuel work by almost 100 employees recruited in the past few months, mostly from big pharma firms.
Financings ramped up dramatically in 2015 with $68 billion collected, but the amount does not touch biopharma investment in the last two years. The industry has raised $113 billion in 2021, down from the $134.5 billion full year 2020 total, but more than every five-year combination total from the years 2000 to 2014. It is an increase of 65% over 2015, 200% over 2016, 118% over 2017, 68% over 2018 and 95% over 2019. Both IPOs ($23.7 billion) and venture capital rounds ($37.8 billion) have hit all-time records this year. But will the onslaught of money continue for the industry?
LONDON – Aviadobio Ltd. has raised $80 million in a series A round to take a precision microdosed gene therapy for treating familial frontotemporal dementia into a phase I/II clinical trial.
Tune Therapeutics Inc. launched with $40 million in initial financing and plans to pursue both rare and complex disease indications with a series of epigenetic editors that employ CRISPR-Cas9 DNA recognition to modulate gene expression in a targeted fashion, without introducing potentially problematic DNA strand breaks or changes to the genetic code.
RSS
