Sofinnova closes new fund and backs a trio of new biotechs
Strong support from pharma groups, including Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Pfizer, has allowed European venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners to close a new biotech fund with €165 million ($180 million) at its disposal.
The Biovelocita II fund builds on an impressive €1.2 billion raised by the VC last year and comes alongside the announcement this morning of three new biotech startups that have come into being with the help of Sofinnova backing.
In a statement, it said the fund – now claimed to be the largest Pan-European biotech accelerator – had exceeded its target and marks "a significant expansion of Sofinnova's biotech acceleration strategy, extending beyond Italy to include France, the UK, and Denmark, with ambitions to further reach additional European countries in the future."
The Paris, London, and Milan-based company has more than €4 billion in investments across the biopharma, medtech, industrial biotech, and digital medicine categories, and has provided funding to more than 500 companies since it was formed in the early 1970s.
The new fund has already screened over 300 projects and made several key investments into new companies, including Alzheimer's disease-focused BioClec, fibrosis specialist Forth Therapeutics, and Signadori Bio, which is developing cell therapies.
Italy-headquartered Bioclec is focused on developing Alzheimer's therapies targeting microglia, the brain's immune cells, building on the research of co-founder Dr Marco Colonna of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, US. Its projects – targeting a novel microglial pathway – are still in the discovery phase.
Forth Therapeutics, a spin-out of the University of Edinburgh in the UK, is hoping to use research by fibrosis and tissue regeneration expert Prof Neil Henderson as the basis for a precision therapeutics platform that aims to tackle fibrosis across multiple organ systems. It has three development programmes on the go, as well as access to one of the world's largest single-cell human liver disease datasets.
Finally, Signadori Bio has been set up in collaboration with the Gustave Roussy Institute in Paris, France, and will develop cell therapies for cancer, drawing on the expertise of scientific founders Dr Jean-Luc Perfettini and Prof Nathalie Chaput.
"We have now developed a pan-European strategy and assembled a world-class team to create and manage companies across the European biotech ecosystem," said Graziano Seghezzi, managing partner of Sofinnova Partners.
"The strong response from our pharmaceutical partners and the fact that we exceeded our fundraising target underscores the demand for such an approach," he added.
Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay
