LONDON – Engitix Therapeutics Ltd. has raised $54 million in a series A round to advance early programs arising from its human extracellular matrix (ECM) target discovery platform towards the clinic with the support of new partner and equity investor Dompé Farmaceutici SpA.
Ceptur Therapeutics Inc. has completed a $75 million series A financing to develop targeted oligonucleotide therapies based on its U1 adaptor technology. The adaptors are bivalent oligonucleotides designed to engage sequence-specific mRNA and the U1 small nuclear ribonuclear protein that regulates transcription and splicing. The therapeutics are for controlling gene expression at the pre-mRNA level within the nucleus.
LONDON – Natural killer (NK) cell therapy specialist Onk Therapeutics Ltd. has raised $21.5 million in a series A, enabling it to move three lead programs into proof-of-concept animal testing and to progress manufacturing and scale-up of its cord blood-derived cells.
Endogena Therapeutics Inc., of San Francisco, has raised another $20 million in a series A funding round to progress a regenerative medicine that could use stem cells to “heal” the damage caused by eye disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP).
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.
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.
Protego Biopharma Inc. raised $51 million in a series A financing to advance the targeting of protein misfolding diseases. The fundraising is a few years on from 2017, when the idea underscoring the company’s birth was to build a platform based on small molecules that could stabilize proteins and restore their functionality.
Chroma Medicine Inc. emerged from stealth with $125 million in series A financing and high ambitions to rewrite the rules of genomic medicine by modulating the epigenetic status of target genes in order to switch expression on or off and thereby achieve therapeutic outcomes.
SK Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. has launched a central nervous system-focused biotech company called Ignis Therapeutics Ltd. with a $180 million series A round led by 6 Dimensions Capital L.P. The financing of the new Shanghai-based company represents the largest series A investment in China’s biopharma industry in 2021, according to the two founding companies. KB Investment Co. Ltd, WTT investment Ltd., HBM Healthcare Investments AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also participated in the round.