Venture Capital Deals At A Glance
Octant Bio, Inc.; Emeryville, CA	Octant, which closed a $30m series A round nearly two years ago, revealed an $80m series B round on 21 April. (Also see "Finance Watch: Atea Pharmaceuticals Raises $215m For COVID-19 Antiviral" - Scrip, 21 May, 2020.) The company is developing precision medicines for complex diseases with a technology platform that leverages synthetic biology, high throughput multiplexed assays, synthetic chemistry and computation to engineer and interrogate drugs, proteins and cellular pathways at “unprecedented” scales with the goal of delivering safer, more effective and less costly drugs. The series B funds will be used to build out Octant’s platform and advance small molecule chaperone therapies for rare genetic diseases.
Pheast Therapeutics; Palo Alto, CA	The preclinical immuno-oncology company said on 26 April it raised $76m in a series A funding round to advance its pipeline of innate immune checkpoint inhibitors. Pheast’s primary program targets CD24, a “don't eat me” signal commandeered by many cancers, including ovarian and breast cancer, in order to avoid detection and clearance by intra-tumoral macrophages. The company was spun out of the Stanford University laboratory of Irving Weissman, a co-founder of Forty Seven Inc. (acquired by Gilead Sciences, Inc. in 2020) who was instrumental in the discovery of CD47 as another “don't eat me” signal and the development of the anti-CD47 candidate magrolimab for multiple hematologic malignancies. (Also see "Gilead’s Magrolimab Mostly Back On Track As FDA Lifts AML, MDS Holds" - Scrip, 12 April, 2022.). Pheast is also looking at combining macrophage checkpoint inhibitors with existing anti-cancer therapies. Catalio Capital Management and ARCH Venture Partners led the series B, with participation from Alexandria Venture Investments and Risk and Reward.
Ashvattha Therapeutics LLC; Redwood City, CA	The company said on 27 April that it plans to advance its hydroxyl dendrimer therapeutics (HDT) pipeline with $69m from a series B financing. The funding was led by Huadong Medicine Co., Ltd. with participation from existing investors, including Natural Capital, Plum Alley and Tribe Capital. HDTs have the ability to cross the blood-brain and blood-retinal barriers to treat neurological, eye and inflammatory diseases, according to Ashvattha, which also unveiled a licensing agreement with Huadong for commercialization rights to its assets in China and parts of southeast Asia. Huadong will advance up to $30m to cover R&D costs for Ashvattha’s HDT clinical therapies OP-101 (severe COVID-19), D-4517.2 (wet age-related macular degeneration/diabetic macular edema) and OP-801 (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and an additional $15m for preclinical candidates.
Apertura Gene Therapy; New York and Cambridge MA	Apertura revealed on 26 April that it closed a $67m series A round led by Deerfield Management, with the proceeds going towards the development of therapies using technologies that address the limitations of genetic medicine delivery and expression. The company's two platform technologies, developed by investigators at the Broad Institute, leverage machine learning and high-throughput assays to engineer novel capsids and gene regulatory elements and ensure the therapeutic payload is expressed at the correct level in target cells. As well as developing its internal programs, Apertura is also looking to establish partnerships with biopharma companies and academic groups.
Visima Therapeutics; Shanghai, China	Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Vivo Capital announced on 25 April that they have launched a joint venture called Visima to expand the reach of innovative medicines into greater China. Vivo made a $60m initial investment in the company, which will have exclusive rights to four of Arrowhead’s RNA therapeutics for cardiometabolic diseases in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Arrowhead has a majority stake in Visima and will earn royalties on product sales in Greater China.
Kelonia Therapeutics; Boston	The company emerged from stealth on 28 April after closing a $50m series A financing to help develop targeted genetic medicines, backed by a syndicate of investors that includes Alta Partners, Horizons Ventures and Venrock. Kelonia's first program is an off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to treat hematologic cancer designed to combine the benefits of CAR-T cell therapy but without the typical CAR-T toxicities and with the ease of access of conventional medicines. Based on discoveries made at MIT and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Kelonia claims its in vivo gene delivery technology enables a few potent lentiviral vector-like particles armed with an adjustable targeting system to precisely and safely deliver payloads exactly where needed to treat a broad range of diseases. It has already established strategic collaborations with Adimab, LLC and ElevateBio, LLC.
Unlearn; San Francisco	Unlearn said on 19 April that it closed a $50m series B round to fund the ongoing development of its machine-learning technology that generates digital twins of patients in clinical trials to enable smaller, faster studies. (Also see "A New Generation Invents Pharma’s Mirrored Future" - In Vivo, 17 November, 2021.) The company recently entered into an agreement with Merck KGAA to use the platform in Phase II and III trials, which will allow for smaller control groups in studies used to support regulatory decisions in the German company’s immunology pipeline.
CytoTronics; Boston	The start-up announced on 28 April that it raised $9.25m in seed financing to fund its next-generation complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-powered drug discovery platform. CytoTronics, spun out of Harvard University, will use the initial funding to advance its platform, which uses computer chip technology to conduct a suite of electrical and electrochemical cell-based assays with the goal of speeding up drug discovery.

Finance Watch: HilleVax, Belite Bio Launch First Two Biopharma IPOs In Q2

Year-To-Date US First-Time Offerings Finally Hit Double Digits

More from Financing

More from Business