Novartis Venture et al. in €33m series-C round for Opsona

The existing investors providing more capital for Opsona are Novartis Venture Fund, Fountain Healthcare Partners, Roche Venture Fund and Seroba Kernel Life Sciences, with Novartis Venture Fund leading the deal alongside BB Biotech Ventures, a new investor.

The other new investors include Sunstone Capital, Baxter Ventures, Amgen Ventures and EMBL Ventures.

The fresh funding will be used to finance the Phase II clinical trial of Opsona's product, OPN-305. The clinical trial will evaluate the safety, efficacy and tolerability of OPN-305 in kidney transplant patients at high risk of delayed graft function (DGF), which happens immediately after surgery and means that the patient's new kidney is not functioning correctly.

Novartis typically invests $15-30m per company over the course of the holding period. The evergreen fund currently has $550m under management.

BB Biotech Ventures is believed to have made the investment through its BB Biotech Ventures III fund, a closed-end fund which held its final close in July 2009 at €67.5m. According to unquote" data, the fund typically invests around €5m per company.

Previous funding
In 2009 Opsona raised a total of €21.3m in a two-part series-B funding round. The developer originally closed the round on €18m in February 2009, having received new backing from Novartis Venture Fund and Fountain Healthcare Partners, and additional backing from previous investors Inventages Venture Capital and Seroba Kernel Life Sciences. In May of the same year, however, Roche Venture Fund and Enterprise Ireland committed a further €3.3m to the round.

Prior to this, Opsona received €6.6m in a series-A round which saw Inventages, Seroba BioVentures, Genentech Inc and Enterprise Ireland invest in the development company.

Company
Opsona was founded in 2004 by three immunologists at Trinity College in Dublin. The company develops drugs targeting the innate immune system, which immediately defends the body from infection, but responds to pathogens in a generic way and does not adapt to give a human long-lasting protection from infection.

Opsona is currently in Phase II of a clinical trial for its OPN-305 product, an antibody which targets a receptor in the body called Toll-like-receptor-2 (TLR-2). TLR-2 recognises foreign substances and passes signals to the cells in the body's immune system.

People
Dr Martin Welschof is the CEO of Opsona. Dr Martin Muenchbach is a managing director at BB Biotech. Florent Gros is a managing director at Novartis and sits on Opsona's board.

This latest round of funding will see BB Biotech, Sunstone and Baxter make additions to Opsona's board of directors.

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• Topics
• Early-stage
• UK / Ireland
• Healthcare
• Ireland
• Sunstone Capital A/S