LONDON – In the largest-ever series A for a Spanish biotech, Splicebio S.L. has raised €50 million (US$56.9 million) to apply its protein splicing technology to the delivery of large genes that do not fit into existing vectors. The company claims its approach will overcome the capacity constraints of adeno-associated viral vectors (AAVs), by splitting genes into parcels and reconstituting the proteins they express in vivo.
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.
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).
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