LONDON – The team that opened up the market for anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) drugs in the treatment of eye diseases has formed a new company, Eyebio Ltd., with the aim of developing a new generation of ocular therapies. David Guyer and Anthony Adamis, founders of Eyetech Pharmaceuticals Inc., which brought Macugen (pegaptanib sodium) through to FDA approval in December 2004, set up Eyebio in August last year, with seed funding from SV Health Investors.

LONDON – Targed Biopharmaceuticals BV has raised €39 million (US$44.2 million) in a series A financing that will enable it to take its targeted clot busting drug Microlyse into clinical development. The first-in-class product consists of urokinase, a serine protease involved in the conversion of inactive plasminogen to active plasmin, linked to a nanobody targeted at von Willebrand factor, the blood glycoprotein that plays a key role in hemostasis.

Curevo Vaccine Inc. closed on a $60 million series A financing designed to take the company through releasing top-line data for its phase IIb study of CRV-101 for treating shingles in older adults. That means taking on a blockbuster, Shingrix from Glaxosmithkline plc.

These days it’s nearly impossible to turn around in the biopharma world without hearing about how some company is going to use machine learning to revolutionize drug development. “It really is a catchphrase,” acknowledged Jo Viney, whose latest startup, Seismic Therapeutic Inc. launched with a $101 million series A round to advance a platform incorporating machine learning capabilities to find new drugs for autoimmune diseases.

Congruence Therapeutics Inc. has closed on a $50 million series A financing to design small molecules to treat rare diseases with protein misfolding. Montreal-based Congruence uses structural bioinformatics, computational chemistry and machine learning in its in silico platform that detects key biophysical features on proteins. That data are used to then design drugs.

The G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) is a foundational building block of modern medicine. While nearly everyone has taken one sometime in the past few decades, development has greatly slowed. With a fundraiser in hand, Septerna Inc. is looking at new ways of working around and through old problems.

LONDON – Cytovation AS has raised $20 million in a series A, enabling it to expand the monotherapy arm of a phase I/II trial of its tumor membrane immunotherapy, Cypep-1, and to test it in three combination arms with the checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda (pembrolizumab).

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.