LSP and Versant back Nouscom's €12m series-A

The funds will be used to support discovery and development of personalised cancer vaccines and tumor selective oncolytic viruses.

The founders of Nouscom have previously worked together in other enterprises, including biotech company Okairos. Founded in 2007 and backed by Versant and LSP, the business was exited to GlaxoSmithKline in 2013.

Healthcare investment firm Versant Ventures has $1.9bn under management and offices in North America and Europe. LSP provides financing for private and public life sciences companies. The VC is currently raising its fifth fund, for which it is targeting €150m.

Company
Based in Basel, Nouscom's technology focuses on viral vectors and oncolytic viruses, which infect and kill tumor cells and stimulate an immune response against cancer cells throughout the body.

It has two product candidates, the Endovax and Exovax programmes. Endovax, an antigenless vaccine, is based on oncolytic viruses capable of infecting and replicating only in cancer cells and causing immunogenic cell death, thereby recruiting T cells at the tumor site and reactivating T cells exhausted in the tumor micro-environment.

Exovax is a personalised patient-specific vaccine, based on viral vectors coding for strings of cancer neoantigens to induce and expand cancer and patient specific T cells.

People
Nouscom – Riccardo Cortese (CEO).
Versant Ventures – Guido Magni (partner).

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• Early-stage
• DACH
• Healthcare
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• Venture