Bionaut Labs emerged from five years in stealth mode raising $20 million to develop Bionauts, microrobots designed to deliver therapies to treat brain disorders. The financing will support the company’s therapeutic program in glioma through preclinical development and further research and development in Huntington’s disease.
Amunix Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Angie You told BioWorld that her firm has already done most of the optimization with its unique T-cell engager platform, so that the effort now is mostly “about cranking out more INDs.”
Berkeley, Calif.-based Caribou Biosciences Inc. has raised $115 million in an oversubscribed series C financing co-led by Farallon Capital Management, PFM Health Sciences and Ridgeback Capital Investments. Proceeds from the round will be used to advance its CRISPR technology platform and pipeline of off-the-shelf genome-edited CAR T and CAR-NK cell cancer therapies, including CB-010, its lead CAR T program, now in a phase I trial for patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Little more than two months after cutting a deal with Merck & Co. Inc. that could top $1 billion, Janux Therapeutics Inc. has closed on a $56 million series A. Janux is developing immunotherapies designed to trigger the immune system to kill specific tumors while leaving the healthy tissue safely alone. T-cell engagers bind to a tumor cell and use the patient’s T cells to eliminate the tumor.
Century Therapeutics Inc. raised $160 million in a series C round to progress its preclinical pipeline of allogeneic cell therapies for cancer, which are derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and to expand its operational, laboratory and production facilities across several locations.
Four years after leaving the Nasdaq, Sciclone Pharmaceuticals Holdings Ltd. returned to the market March 3, issuing 116 million shares to raise HK$2.18 billion (US$281 million) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX). Shares were priced at HK$18.8 each.
DUBLIN – Sofinnova Partners closed out its crossover fund at €445 million (US$535 million), a total, it said, that makes it Europe’s largest crossover investor in biotech. It’s almost three years since Paris-based Sofinnova Partners completed an initial close at €275 million. “We didn’t set a bar – we thought between €250 million and €400 million would be great,” Antoine Papiernik, chairman and managing partner at Sofinnova, told BioWorld.