With the massive amounts of capital raised by global public and private biopharmaceutical companies last year generating approximately $134 billion – a total that was almost double the previous record of about $69 billion raised in 2015 – it is not surprising that financing for the regenerative medicine and advanced therapy sector also set an annual record.
Scribe Therapeutics Inc. raised $100 million in a series B round to continue its engineering-intensive approach to developing CRISPR-based therapies that employ custom-designed CasX enzymes.
CEO Dipal Doshi of Boston-based Entrada Therapeutics Inc. said the field of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) therapeutics has seen “a lot of first-generation, interesting programs that have kickstarted more focus” on the disease, “but no one really is fundamentally moving the needle in a robust clinical way.” His firm, with $116 million in new series B money, wants to change that. “Our focus on DMD is very direct and very specific,” he told BioWorld.
Charlene Liao, Immune-Onc Therapeutics Inc.’s CEO told BioWorld she has a solid plan for using the company’s new $73 million series B1 and B2 financing. “It is time to go beyond T cells and to consider myeloid checkpoints as the next wave of cancer immunotherapies,” she said. Immune-Onc will use the funding to target myeloid checkpoints, especially leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor subfamily B, as it continues to develop its blood cancer and solid tumor therapies.
Qihan Biotechology Co. Ltd., a company known for its multiplexable genome editing technology, has yet again extended its series A financing, this time with a $67 million round that will support advancement of its allogeneic cell therapy candidates to IND in China. To date the company has raised more than $100 million.
Pyxis Oncology Inc., a company building a portfolio of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and immunotherapies for cancer, has closed a $152 million series B financing co-led by Arix Bioscience and RTW Investments LP. The fresh funds will help the company advance multiple ADC candidates in-licensed from Pfizer Inc. and Legochem Biosciences Inc. as well as its discovery-stage pipeline, CEO Lara Sullivan told BioWorld. The ADCs are expected to move to the clinic in 2022.
RSS
