Capella Biosciences (UK) is a life sciences start-up specializing in antibodies. It has just raised an additional €14.3M in a Series A round to develop their antibody pipeline to clinical stages.
Capella started out in 2014 and based in London, defining its mission as developing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies for unmet medical needs. Back then, it received seed funding from Advent Life Sciences and Index Venture Life Sciences.
The start-up has now received €14.3M (£11M) in a Series A financing round. Both Advent and the re-branded Medicxi Ventures (former Index Venture Life Sciences) chipped in to help Capella on its way. Medixci Ventures is a €210M fund focused on drug discovery which was just re-launched last month.
These 2 European VCs are joined by US’s Osage University Partners, another VC which usually invests in start-ups to help them commercialize ‘cutting edge university technologies‘.
The money will support the progress of Capella’s therapeutic antibody discovery programs, mainly in oncology and autoimmune diseases (though specifics are not further disclosed on their website yet…), and help to advance them to the clinical evaluation stage.
The COO of Capella, Steve Holmes, confided in an interview with Fierce Biotech that their most advanced candidates targets Crohn’s disease and generalised ‘fibrosis’.
However, their modus operandi allows them the flexibility to work on whatever can be sold to a Pharma as an clinical early-stage candidate. Capella’s key strategy is to find antibodies that work on biological targets that are well-studied, but still haven’t yet been developed into an actual drug.
It will be interesting to see how Capella’s model works in the future, and whether its antibodies can break into clinical development. At least it has the network in place (and location) for comprehensive clinical research.