It’s the first official Beyond Biotech podcast! And this week, we have three interviews.
We talked with Ros Deegan, CEO of OMass; David Solomon, CEO of PharNext; and two people from Forbion, Sander Slootweg, managing partner, and Dirk Mertens, general partner.
Forbion
European life sciences venture capital firm Forbion, has announced the first €470M ($500M) close of its Forbion Growth Opportunities Fund II.
The fund will focus on investing in late-stage European life sciences companies.
The new fund has attracted several new institutional investors, including pension funds PME and PMT, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Reggeborgh, who join returning investors Pantheon, Wealth Management Partners and Eli Lilly and Company.
The second fund will invest in mostly European, later-stage biopharma companies, developing novel therapies for areas of high medical need.
OMass
The UK firm OMass Therapeutics recently unveiled a €90 million Series B financing to bankroll the development of small molecules against so-called ‘undruggable’ targets, including one that sank Quench Bio last year.
In 2020, Quench Bio captured the imagination of investors with the US firm’s ambition to develop a new class of anti-inflammatory drugs. The startup aimed to block the protein gasdermin D, which is linked to a host of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
Following Quench’s experience, OMass Therapeutics’ Series B round will finance its own shot at gasdermin D.
PharNext
Pharnext SA, an advanced late-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases with high unmet medical need, has completed the enrollment of 387 patients in its pivotal phase 3 clinical study of PXT3003, the PREMIER trial, in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A (‘CMT1A’).