Despite what appears to be a recovering public financing market for the biopharma industry, with about $20 billion raised so far through follow-on offerings in the first two months of 2024, emerging companies remain in that precarious position between dwindling cash and their next milestone inflection points.
San Diego-based Kenai Therapeutics Inc. raised $82 million in a series A round to move its disease-modifying cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease into the clinic. The company, which leverages induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, will advance its next-generation allogeneic neuron replacement cell therapies for neurological diseases, specifically completing a clinical proof-of-concept trial for its lead candidate, RNDP-001.
Ocular gene therapy specialist Pulsesight Therapeutics SAS has launched with seed funding and is raising a series A to take forward two programs using electroporation to deliver plasmid DNA in the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration and geographic atrophy.
Curve Therapeutics Ltd. has raised £40.5 million (US$51.2 million) in a series A round to take two lead programs toward the clinic over the next three years. Since its formation in 2019, Curve has applied its Microcycle intracellular screening platform to discover a pipeline of small molecules against oncology targets that have evaded conventional approaches.
Companies and investors, well aware of the natural up and down fluctuations of the market, keep expecting the current downturn to end. They’ve been expecting it to begin an upturn for the past two years. During a Feb. 26 session on venture capital trends at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference in New York, investors said the tough times might well extend further into 2024 than they would like.
With the number of people with dementia in Australia expected to nearly double by 2054, the federal government is funding a new AU$50 million (US$32.76 million) biomedical and med-tech incubator program to develop new therapies, medical devices and digital health technologies to address dementia and cognitive decline.
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