Raising $94 million in a series A round, South San Francisco-based Firefly Bio Inc. has emerged from stealth to advance its Firelink linker platform technology to develop degrader-antibody conjugates (DACs) to treat cancer. A combination of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and targeted protein degradation therapies, DACs are a new class of medicines that have recently gained attention for their ability to replace toxic ADC payloads and to eliminate cancer-driven proteins.
If Freenome Holdings Inc.’s $254 million funding round is a sign, the capital markets for med-tech may finally be thawing. The cancer diagnostics company’s latest cash infusion brings its total funds raised to date to more than $1.3 billion. Freenome co-founder and Chief Product Officer Riley Ennis told BioWorld the company’s success in raising cash in a challenging market was attributable to the “perfect storm of huge unmet need and the opportunity that we have, given the treatment advancements.”
Venture capital (VC) firm TVM Capital Life Science recently co-led a $16 million series A financing for Vektor Medical Inc., which has developed an AI-based tool that identifies potential arrhythmia source locations. The funding is part of TVM’s strategy of investing in med-tech companies which have no development risk and offer an exit opportunity in under four years.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Feb. 14 that it may elevate the threshold for registration of venture capital (VC) funds from $10 million to $12 million, a move that would exempt at least a few med-tech VC funds from registration requirements.
When founders of Latigo Biotherapeutics Inc. first set out a few years ago to establish a biopharma firm focused in the area of pain, the plan had been to get a head start by in-licensing promising assets in the space. But that proved easier said than done. “With the exception of very early chemical matter” from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, “we really couldn’t find anything else of quality to bring in, which I think is a testament to how little pain research and investment was ongoing in pharma and academia,” said Sean Harper, co-founding managing director at Westlake Village Biopartners, which founded Latigo in 2020 and led the firm’s $135 million series A round.
Bioage Labs Inc.’s $170 million series D financing will pay for phase II trials with azelaprag, an apelin receptor agonist, to be tried in combination with Zepbound (tirzepatide), the glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist from Bioage partner Eli Lilly and Co.
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