Mablink Bioscience SAS

Sofinnova Partners has raised €1.2 billion ($1.26 billion) across its various investment strategies over the past year, the European life sciences investor said Tuesday morning, sharing its plans to put the money to work in startups across drug development, medtech, industrial biotech and digital medicine. Most of the new money was secured in the fourth quarter, chairman Antoine Papiernik told Endpoints News . It now has €4 billion ($4.2 billion) in assets under management, double where the firm was five years ago, Papiernik said. “In our history, we’ve never raised €1.2 billion in any time like this in a short period of time,” Papiernik said. “So that’s the main news for us, particularly in the time we are, which is quite difficult, globally speaking, for companies to fundraise but also for VCs.” It helped that Sofinnova returned cash to its investors in the past 12 months, Papiernik said. “If you bring back cash to LPs, they take the meeting in general to hear what the story is for the new fund,” he said. The new money will go toward the firm’s seven investment strategies, which cover the breadth of life sciences funding, from startup incubation all the way to later-stage growth rounds. The Paris, London and Milan firm has backed more than 500 companies since its 1972 inception. Papiernik has been at the firm since 1997. Papiernik said he couldn’t disclose the breakdown of the money across the seven strategies because of regulatory reasons, but noted the final closings for each strategy will eventually be announced. The firm has been behind companies like Mablink Bioscience (acquired by Eli Lilly), CinCor (bought by AstraZeneca) and Shockwave Medical (scooped up by Johnson & Johnson), among others. A “bulk” of the firm’s investments go to biotech companies, with another 25% historically going to medtech, Papiernik said. About 70% goes toward European companies and the rest mainly toward the US. The firm is also interested in the growing biotech scene in China, Papiernik said. The firm is using artificial intelligence to mine through its five decades of proprietary data on tens of thousands of deals that they’ve seen, Papiernik said. They’ve also added in public data into their AI program, which is named Sofia. The moniker is a play on Sofinnova and AI in French, plus it means wisdom in Greek. It was also developed internally by a Greek Sofinnova employee, he added. “Today, any deals that come in, benefits from the 50 years of knowledge that is in Sofinnova,” the chair said. Europe’s life sciences scene attracted additional interest last year, with new pools of capital at firms like Forbion , Kurma Partners , Earlybird Health , Asabys and others. This year, a handful have announced raises or plans to add funds, including $428 million for Aditum Bio and another $340 million at Curie.Bio . 8VC, which also invests in tech more broadly, is planning a $1 billion fund .

Oblique said the partnership will generate milestones and royalties if successful. Image credit: Shutterstock/ Tada Images. Eli Lilly is strengthening its ties with Oblique Therapeutics, as the two companies announced an expansion to their collaboration agreement to include a second “high-value target”. Building on the existing agreement from November 2023, Eli Lilly will continue to use Oblique’s AbiProt platform to discover antibodies. Specifically, Sweden-based Oblique will partner with Lilly Catalyze360-ExploR&D, an arm of the company that offers clinical development capabilities for partnered biotechs and drug developers, as per a 22 August press release. The financial terms of the expanded deal were not disclosed, and neither was the target of its application. Oblique did state that if treatments are developed successfully, the partnership will “generate milestones and royalties”. Abiprot identifies therapeutic antibodies that can be programmed to have a specific pharmacological function. Oblique states its technology can help develop effective medicines against difficult-to-drug target proteins. The biotech’s platform uses microfluidics and proteases as molecular probes and provides sequence and structure information for epitope identification. Oblique itself says it focuses on pain projects in its internal portfolio. AbiProt has previously been used to discover and develop two antibodies targeting TRPV1 and KRAS for pain and cancer respectively, as per a research article published in Science Advances . See Also: FDA approves updated mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 Verve Therapeutics gets grant for gene editing compositions to lower ldl cholesterol levels Oblique’s CEO Christer Nordstedt said: “We are delighted to expand the collaboration between our companies and together create new science to address the unmet medical need in severe diseases. This collaboration with Lilly is of great importance to us and will further strengthen our position within the antibody discovery space.” This is not the only antibody discovery partnership Eli Lilly has tapped this year. The drugmaker expanded a partnership with AbCellera Biologics to discover therapeutic antibodies in immunology, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience programmes in August. The original agreement between the two companies has been fruitful, with eight programmes progressing as a result. Eli Lilly also acquired French biotech company Mablink to solidify its antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) framework. Mablink’s PSARLink technology disguises cancer-killing molecules, allowing them to be delivered precisely to cancer cells while sparing healthy cells.

Ipsen will take over responsibility for preparing Foreseen Biotechnology's FS001 to enter phase 1 trials. Ipsen is back with its second antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) deal of the year, this time signing a $1 billion biobucks pact with Foreseen Biotechnology for a preclinical solid tumor candidate. The candidate in question, dubbed FS001, uses a cleavable linker coupled to a potent topoisomerase I (Topo1) inhibitor to target a novel, undisclosed tumor-associated antigen. FS001 has already proven its first-in-class potential in multidrug-resistant cancer models and is currently completing the final stages of preclinical development, Ipsen said in the July 11 release. In return for the exclusive worldwide rights to develop, manufacture and commercialize FS001, the French biotech has signed a deal totaling $1.03 billion in upfront, development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments. While the company didn’t give a breakdown of the financials, it did say that Foreseen will also be eligible for tiered royalties on global sales should FS001 get to market. Ipsen will take over responsibility for preparing the candidate to enter phase 1 trials, including overseeing the submission of a investigational new drug application to the FDA. Topo1 inhibitors have already caught the attention of major players in the ADC space, including Eli Lilly’s acquisition of Mablink Biosciences and AbbVie’s buyout of ProfoundBio. The ADCs at the center of both those deals are designed to deliver the Topo1 inhibitor to cells that express folate receptor alpha (FRα). Today’s deal comes three months after Ipsen joined the ADC race via $90 million in near-term payments to attain the global rights to a preclinical candidate from Sutro Biopharma. That agreement also saw Ipsen take responsibility for bringing the asset—which targets the receptor tyrosine kinase-like orphan receptor 1 (ROR1) tumor antigen—into the clinic. The Sutro pact was part of Ipsen’s external innovation strategy intended to add a third driver of growth, on top of existing products and new launches, and offset the loss of somatuline sales. “We are excited to add FS001, the second ADC Ipsen has in-licensed this year, to our growing pipeline,” Mary Jane Hinrichs, Ph.D., senior vice president and head of early development at Ipsen, said in this morning’s release. “Using cutting-edge proteomics technology and AI-powered screening platforms the Foreseen team has uncovered a novel and clinically relevant target which could unlock the potential of ADCs for even more people living with hard-to-treat forms of cancer,” Hinrichs added. “As we prepare for the initiation of a phase 1 clinical trial, we will evaluate FS001 in selected solid tumor types, which we hope will deliver critical new treatments for people living with cancer around the world.” Since being founded in 2021, Foreseen has kept a low profile with the company’s website currently under development. Today’s release says the “emerging biotech,” which was incubated by Massachusetts-based VC firm Nest.Bio Ventures, uses a translational proteomics platform to “accelerate discovery of novel targets for therapeutics and diagnostics.” The red-hot therapy area of ADCs isn’t the only modality on Ipsen’s radar this summer. Last month, the Paris-based biotech paid Marengo up to $1.2 billion to access a T-cell engager platform for targeting immunologically cold tumors that are typically resistant to immunotherapies.