DUBLIN – Truffle Capital closed off its fifth Biomedtech fund with a €250 million (US$279 million) raise, which it will deploy in about a dozen companies located mainly in France. The fund took a little longer to close than originally planned but it is significantly larger than it had originally intended. “Our initial objective was €200 million,” Truffle Capital CEO and co-founder Philippe Pouletty told BioWorld.

DUBLIN – The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use closed out its year’s work with positive opinions on two applications, Novartis AG’s Beovu (brolucizumab) in wet age-related macular degeneration and Merck & Co. Inc.’s Recarbrio for treating gram negative infections in adults.

DUBLIN – Numab Therapeutics AG is banking an equity investment of CHF15 million (US$15.2 million) from its latest Asian partner, Sunshine Guojian Pharmaceutical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., as part of a broad alliance to develop up to five multispecific antibodies from three programs based on Numab’s Match platform.

DUBLIN – Immunos Therapeutics AG raised CHF15 million (US$15.2 million) in a series A round to move a novel immuno-oncology platform designed to turn cold tumors hot into early clinical development.

DUBLIN – Sanofi SA is paying a hefty 172% premium to acquire Synthorx Inc. for $68 per share, or $2.5 billion in all, to add a clinical-stage immuno-oncology asset to its pipeline and a platform technology that will enable it to optimize cytokine-based drugs for cancer and autoimmune disease.

DUBLIN – 4Teen4 Pharmaceuticals GmbH raised €6.9 million (US$7.7 million) in a series A round to take procizumab, a first-in-class inhibitor of circulating dipeptidyl-peptidase 3 (cDPP3), into clinical trials for patients with cardiogenic shock.

DUBLIN – Imcheck Therapeutics SAS raised €48 million (US$53.2 million) in a series B financing round to move a pipeline of antibodies targeting gamma delta T cells into the clinic.

DUBLIN – Novartis AG is making a $9.7 billion bet that the economics of an siRNA-based drug can better those of monoclonal antibodies and thus provide it with a dominant position in a major but still emerging cardiovascular drug market. The Basel, Switzerland-based pharma made an $85 per share offer for The Medicines Co., which has taken inclisiran, an siRNA-based inhibitor of proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) to the brink of an approval in reducing the risk of a cardiovascular event – heart attack or stroke – in high-risk patients with cardiovascular disease or high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) who are inadequately controlled on current therapies.

DUBLIN – Crispr Therapeutics AG has delivered what appears, so far at least, to be a safe, functional cure for the first patient enrolled in each of its phase I/II trials of lead CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing therapy CTX-001, in beta-thalassemia and in sickle cell disease.