Radiopharma firm AdvanCell raises $315m, and other financings

In the biggest venture capital financing this week, clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical AdvanCell has closed a $315 million Series D that swells its coffers as it moves its lead prostate cancer therapy into phase 3 testing.

The oversubscribed financing, led by Ally Bridge Group and Alpha Wave, is earmarked for the continued development of ADVC001 – a PSMA-targeted radioligand therapy based on lead-212 that is in a phase 2 trial for metastatic prostate cancer – and to expand its manufacturing capacity for the isotope.

ADVC001 has already delivered encouraging safety and efficacy in the ongoing study, which revealed a 100% overall response rate in patients with evaluable prostate tumours, with no dose-limiting toxicities and toxicity-related treatment discontinuations or dose modifications.

The US and Australia-based startup is one of a number of biotechs working on the development of targeted alpha therapies (TATs), which are designed to deliver alpha particle radiation to localised areas of the body. The short range of alpha radiation is thought to limit damage to surrounding non-cancerous tissue.

At the moment, Bayer's Xofigo (radium Ra 223 dichloride) is the only approved TAT on the market, used to treat metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) that has spread to bones but not to other organs, although bone safety issues have seen its sales fall sharply from its height of around €500 million a year.

Other biotechs working on TATs include Orano Med, in collaboration with Sanofi and RadioMedix, as well as Perspective Therapeutics, Aktis Oncology, Actinium Pharma, and Akiram Therapeutics.

New investors in the round included Bain Capital Life Sciences and Fidelity Management & Research Co, with former backers, including the VC arms of Sanofi and Eli Lilly, also taking part.

Other recent financing rounds

Also this week, Welsh biotech Draig Therapeutics completed a Series B, raising $65 million in funding led by Deep Track Capital – with participation from Janus Henderson Investors, Marshall Wace, British Business Bank and Jefferson Life Sciences – that will be used to develop its therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders. It comes almost exactly a year after the company emerged from stealth with a $140 million first round.

Since then, the company has advanced its lead programme – AMPA receptor potentiator DT-101 – into phase 2 testing as a monotherapy and adjunctive therapy for major depressive disorder (MDD). The Series B was also supported by Janus Henderson Investors, Marshall Wace, British Business Bank and Jefferson Life Sciences.

In a fourth-round financing, AI drug design specialist Drug Farm of China and the US raised $55 million for its pipeline of drug candidates headed by DF-003, an ALPK1 inhibitor for genetic disease ROSAH syndrome, which is being moved into phase 3 testing after a successful phase 1b study. The funds will also be used to continue the clinical development of DF-006, another ALPK1 inhibitor, for hepatitis B.

The financing round was co-led by the Shanghai Pudong Leading Area Investment Centre and the Shanghai Puxing Collaborative Private Equity Fund Partnership Enterprise, along with multiple new and existing backers.

Staying in the AI arena, China's MindRank AI closed a $52 million Series B, led by a group of institutional and healthcare funds, that will be used for further development of its Molecule Arts Platform (MAP) for drug discovery and design.

The company's lead programme, codenamed MDR-001, is an oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist currently in the phase 3 MOBILE clinical trial in China as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes, having shown encouraging efficacy and a very low treatment discontinuation rate in phase 2b studies. An application to start clinical testing of the drug in the US has also been approved.

Finally, Cambridge, UK-based Alchemab Therapeutics has extended its Series A financing with a £25 million ($34 million) investment from the British Business Bank, which is earmarked for building its clinical pipeline and growing its proprietary unique antibody dataset, which attracted a $415 million alliance with Eli Lilly last year focused on the ATLX-1282 candidate.

The additional funding brings Alchemab's total first-round backing to £109 million, and the company said it will enable it to grow its antibody database from 500 million to a billion antibody sequences, and also advance further clinical candidates into development.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay