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This week we leave the old city of Oxford and travel South East across the channel, through France and arrive at our destination, Zurich, Switzerland. This wonderful city is famous for its many churches (including the Minster), the largest church clock in Europe, found on St Peter’s and is the home of many celebrities including George Clooney. It is also the location of our biotech of the week, Delenex Therapeutics.
City: Zurich, Switzerland
Founded: 2009
Financial Data: €41.3M Total Raised (as of 11/2015)
Employees: 15-30 (as of 11/2015)
CEO: Thomas Hecht
Mission: Delenex Therapeutics is a privately owned, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing applied antibody therapeutics. They’re currently aiming to broaden the benefits of proven antibody therapies to a greater number of people, focusing on dermatological and oncological diseases. Delenex currently has one major platform, PENTRA® bodies, which are highly potent and stable antibody fragments which can easily penetrate tissues and cross barriers in humans. At present, they have multiple fragments in their pipeline, including multiple focused on dermatological diseases (one for psoriasis has completed stage II trials), the rest are currently in pre-clinical. Delenex is also a spin-off from ESBATech, now owned by Novartis.
Comments: Antibodies as therapeutics have changed a lot in cancer treatments and many other diseases. But they also come with many limitations related to their size. Nanobodies, for example, developed by Ablynx, is one solution, as well as the PENTRAbodies developed by Delenex. This could open up a new range of targets which could lead to new effective treatments. But as always with Biotech, technology is good but technology with data from clinical trials is far greater. And Delenex has still some more work to do in clinical trials until it reaches the market.
Are you interested in antibody therapy R&D?