Dyno Therapeutics Raises $9M in Seed Financing

Dyno Therapeutics, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company applying artificial intelligence (AI) to gene therapy, raised $9m in not previously announced seed financing round.

The round – secured when Dyno spun out of the lab of Prof. George Church of Harvard – was co-led by Polaris Partners and CRV. 

Led by Eric Kelsic, Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder, the company has also launched from stealth mode with its proprietary platform, CapsidMap™. The platform applies proprietary artificial intelligence technology to discover and design novel AAV capsids, the cell-targeting protein shell of viral vectors. CapsidMap systematically generates and then evaluates millions of new AAV variants at scale, accelerating the identification of improved AAV vectors. It uses advanced machine learning search algorithms, combined with high-throughput experiments generating massive quantities of in vivo data, to accelerate the creation of superior synthetic AAV capsids. Through its R&D and collaborations with biopharmaceutical companies, Dyno has active programs focused on novel gene therapy vectors for ophthalmic, muscle, central nervous system (CNS), and liver diseases. The platform builds on certain intellectual property developed in the lab of George Church, Ph.D., who is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Core Faculty member at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Dyno has an exclusive option to enter into a license agreement with Harvard University for this technology. Church is a co-founder of Dyno and Chairman of the company’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Alan Crane, a co-founder of Dyno and Entrepreneur Partner at Polaris Partners, and Dylan Morris, General Partner at CRV, have joined Dyno’s board of directors, with Alan Crane serving as Dyno’s Executive Chairman.

In addition, founders include Sam Sinai, Ph.D., Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Adrian Veres, Ph.D., Scientific Advisor, and Tomas Bjorklund, Ph.D., a scientific advisor of Dyno who is Associate Professor at Lund University and a leader in AAV capsid engineering.

Source. FinSMEs, May 11, 2020

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the Canadian startup market; offering strategic communications & public relations services to Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a pre-seed to late stage funded Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax

Alume Biosciences Closes $5.5M Series A Financing Round

Alume Biosciences, Inc., a La Jolla, Calif.-based biotechnology company developing nerve-targeted pharmaceuticals for surgical and therapeutic use, completed a Series A funding in the amount of $5.5m

Backers included co-founder Chrysa Mineo (formerly of Receptos and Neurocrine Biosciences) and Dan Bradbury (co-founder and Executive Chairman of Equillium, Inc. and former CEO of Amylin).

Founded by Quyen Nguyen, MD, PhD, with co-founders Brett Berman, MD, FACC, Chrysa Mineo and scientific co-founder Mike Whitney, PhD, Alume is a biotechnology company that is developing nerve-targeted pharmaceutical agents for surgical and therapeutic use. The company’s first product, ALM-488, is a fluorescently labeled peptide-dye conjugate that makes human nerves “glow,” helping surgeons reduce injury to critical nerves during surgery.

Alume intends to develop agents including ALM-488 to be used as an adjunct during surgery to help surgeons see nerves better compared to current visualization with white light alone.

The company’s technology has the potential to improve the accuracy of nerve identification, decrease operative time, and lead to better outcomes for patients.

Intellectual property underpinning Alume was licensed from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where Dr. Nguyen is a Professor in the Department of Surgery and Director of the Facial Nerve Clinic.

Source. FinSMEs, May 1, 2020

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the Canadian startup market; offering strategic communications & public relations services to Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a pre-seed to late stage funded Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience. 

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax

Inari Raises $45M in Debt Financing USA

Inari, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company developing next-generation seeds, entered into a $45m loan and security agreement with K2 HealthVentures (K2HV), a life sciences-focused investment firm.

The funds complement Inari’s recent $89m equity raise.

The company intends to use the capital to accelerate the development and commercialization of gene-edited crops.

Led by Ponsi Trivisvavet, chief executive officer, Inari uses genetic technologies and data science to develop next-generation seeds that reduce the natural resources required to grow food.

The company was founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2016 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with additional sites in West Lafayette, Ind., and Ghent, Belgium.

Source. FinSMEs, April 23, 2020

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the Canadian startup market; offering strategic communications & public relations services to Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a pre-seed to late stage funded Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience. 

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Nagi Bioscience Raises CHF 1.8M in Seed Funding

Nagi Bioscience SA, a Lausanne, Switzerland–based life-science-tech company developing technology for the in vitro testing of drugs and chemicals, closed a CHF1.8m seed financing round.

Backers included investiere, Zürcher Kantonalbank, NEST pension fund and private investors from Switzerland and United States.

The company intends to use the funds to complete the development of its first product and prepare its market access.

Founded in January 2019 by Dr. Matteo Cornaglia, CEO, and and Dr. Laurent Mouchiroud, CSO, as a spin-off from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Nagi Bioscience has developed “Organism-on-Chip” technology, which leverages the combined use of microfluidics and microscopic worms (the validated biological model C. elegans) to provide a new sustainable alternative to traditional animal testing to pharma, chemical, cosmetic industries and biomedical research. This solution complies with the emerging directives for the replacement, reduction and refinement of animal testing, i.e. the so-called “3Rs” principles, and allows reducing costs and delays of pharmaceutical and chemical research.

Nagi Bioscience has already prototypes under validation in collaboration with key industrial players in the chemical and biotech fields.

Furthermore, the company announced the assignment of Dr. Chris Radloff to the Board of Directors. He is a board director and angel investor in several startups and brings to the company 20+ years of expertise in the life-science-tech field.

Source. FinSMEs, December 23, 2019

                                                                 ***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

BioNTech raises $325M series B round to advance cancer pipeline

BioNTech has raised $325 million (€289 million) in a private fundraising round. The series B positions the immuno-oncology player to advance its multidrug clinical pipeline and grow its manufacturing footprint.

Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech operated for a decade without raising a headline-grabbing round, opting instead to run on money from its billionaire majority owners and partnership fees, such as the $310 million in upfront and near-term milestones put up by Genentech. That changed early in 2018 when BioNTech raised $270 million in a Redmile Group-led series A round.

Now, BioNTech has raised $325 million in a round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. Other existing investors including Redmile and the Struengmann Family Office contributed to the series B round, but two-thirds of the cash came from new investors.

BioNTech will use the cash to build on the work facilitated by its series A round. The company now has seven candidates in eight clinical trials. BioNTech’s most advanced assets are derived from its mRNA platform, which established it as a rival to CureVac and Moderna. But the pipeline now also features cell therapies, small molecules and immune checkpoint modulators.

The expansion and advancement of the pipeline has dialed up BioNTech’s fundraising needs. Some of the additional cash will fund studies of the candidates. Another slice will enable the expansion of BioNTech’s manufacturing capacity to support drug development and potentially commercialization.

Talking to Reuters at the time of the series A round, BioNTech identified the need to “invest enormously in manufacturing” as a key driver of its ongoing hunger for large sums of money. Reports earlier in the year suggested that BioNTech would sate that hunger with an $800 million IPO around the end of 2019. Crossover investors are among the organizations to contribute to the series B round.

In returning to private investors, BioNTech has raised one of the largest ever private biotech rounds in Europe. Immunocore raised a $320 million series A round in 2015, but few other European biotechs have raised triple-digit private rounds, let alone secured hauls of more than $300 million.

Source. FierceBioTech, Nick Paul Taylor, July 9, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax

Bayer powers Versant cell therapy startup to $250M round

Versant Ventures’ Century Therapeutics has exited stealth with $250 million to take allogeneic cell therapies into the clinic. Bayer’s VC wing led the investment with the support of Versant and Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics (FCDI).

Century, like other allogeneic cell therapy players, is trying to improve on autologous products that require the administration of a patient’s own cells back to them by creating off-the-shelf alternatives. The potential of allogeneic therapies has attracted a lot of attention—Allogene Therapeutics alone has raised more than $500 million—but Century thinks it can improve on existing approaches.

That belief rests on Century’s use of self-renewing induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Century puts these cells through multiple rounds of cellular engineering to create master cell banks. By expanding and differentiating the cells in these banks into immune effector cells, Century thinks it can supply “vast amounts” of homogeneous off-the-shelf products. Other developers of allogeneic cell therapies work with nonrenewable donor-derived cells.

Versant set Century up last year to build on the research of the biotech’s scientific cofounders, Marcela Maus, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School and Hiro Nakauchi, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University School of Medicine.

A partnership with Fujifilm subsidiary FCDI followed later in 2018, providing Century with access to an iPSC platform, immune effector cell differentiation protocols and a manufacturing service provider.  

Leaps by Bayer, the VC wing of the German life science company, has committed $215 million to enable Century to build on this platform. With the involvement of Versant and FCDI bringing the size of the round up to $250 million, Century is positioned to move multiple iPSC-derived treatments for blood cancers and solid tumors into human testing.

The pursuit of iPSC-derived cell therapies may take Century into uncharted waters. Maus is among the researchers to previously note the challenges this will entail, telling Cancer Discovery last year that “we don’t have a long safety track record of using pluripotent stem cells clinically, much less genetically manipulated ones.” Other researchers have questioned how companies will convince the FDA that their products are completely free from undifferentiated stem cells. 

Century is well equipped to try to overcome these hurdles. As well as raising $250 million, Century has put together a leadership team with deep experience in immuno-oncology and cell therapies.

Ex-Juno Therapeutics CSO Hyam Levitsky, M.D., has taken up the post of president of R&D at Century. Luis Borges, Ph.D., an ex-Amgen scientist who spent the past two years at Cell Medica, has come on board as CSO. And longtime Celgene and Roche employee Adrienne Farid, Ph.D., has arrived as chief development officer. This team will be led by Lalo Flores, Ph.D., who helped to guide Versant’s Novira Therapeutics to a takeover by Johnson & Johnson in 2015.

Source. FierceBiotech, Nick Paul Taylor, July 1, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Cybrexa Therapeutics Completes $13.4M in Series B1 Funding

Cybrexa Therapeutics, a New Haven, CT-based biotechnology company developing a new class of cancer therapeutics through its alphalex™ tumor targeting platform, completed a $13.4m Series B1 financing.

Backers in the round, which brings total capital raised to date to $21.1m, included CT Innovations, HighCape Capital Special Opportunities Fund, and Cycle Venture Partners.

The company intends to use the funds to advance its first clinical candidate CBX-11 (alphalexTM-rucaparib) into clinical development and to progress additional programs in its preclinical pipeline.

Led by Per Hellsund, President & CEO, Cybrexa is a biotechnology company dedicated to developing an entirely new class of cancer therapies using its alphalex™ platform to deliver anti-cancer agents directly into tumor cells.

The company’s lead candidate, CBX-11 (alphalex™-rucaparib), is in preclinical development with advancing plans to initiate clinical development by 1Q 2020.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, June 20, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

Neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn pulls in $76 million from GV to treat mental disorders

By Sarah Burr

There are numerous challenges to finding effective treatments for mental disorders. However, BlackThorn Therapeutics, a neurobehavioral health company using machine learning to create personalized medicine for mental health, is betting its technological approach to finding drugs that work will put it ahead of the competition. Lucky for them, GV and other biotech investors have shown they agree by adding another $76 million in Series B financing to the coffers.

Today, BlackThorn announced the close of its $76 million Series B round from GV, Scripps Research, Johnson & Johnson Innovation and a bevy of other biotech investment firms, including Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Vertex Ventures HC, Alexandria Venture Investments, Altitude Life Science Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and Biomatics Capital.

BlackThorn has been heads-down the last couple of years on a clinical trial for a drug that could potentially treat mood disorders. In April, the company announced positive results from its phase I trial for the drug.

The company plans to use the funding to advance its clinical-stage programs for mood disorders as well as for potential treatment of autism spectrum disorder, advancing toward a clinical investigation in 2020.

Brian Chee, a managing partner at Polaris Partners, Lori Hu, a managing director at Vertex Ventures HC and Julie Sunderland, a managing director at Biomatics Capital have joined BlackThorn’s board as directors in conjunction with the funding.

BlackThorn also recently added two people to its executive team. Jane Tiller has joined as chief medical officer and Laura Hansen as vice president, corporate affairs.

“BlackThorn was founded to bring new therapies to patients by applying advances in computational sciences to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest historical challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development,” said BlackThorn’s president and COO Bill Martin, PhD. “Three years later, insights from our data-driven approaches are yielding patient enrichment strategies that could increase probability of clinical trial success and improve patient outcomes. We are grateful for our investors’ support to continue advancing our platform and therapeutic pipeline as we build out a world-class team at the intersection of technology and clinical neuroscience.”

Source. Techcrunch, Sarah Burr, June 13, 2019

***

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax