EMBL Ventures invests £2m in Crescendo

Harriet Bailey
08 April 2014

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EMBL Ventures, the venture arm of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, has invested a further ТЃ2m in Cambridge-based Crescendo Biologics' series-A funding round.

This addition brings the total series-A round to £19.5m. The funding will be used to drive development of the biotech's in-house programmes in inflammation and oncology, utilising its VH fragment discovery platform.

EMBL held the first close of its second fund, EMBL Technology Fund II, in December 2011. It had raised €40m, with a target in excess of €50m. The fund usually commits between €2-5m per investment.

Previous funding
Crescendo initially raised £17.5m in a series-A financing round in December last year, led by venture capital firm Imperial Innovations. Imperial contributed £6.4m to the total for a 26.9% stake in the company.

Astellas Venture Management – the corporate arm of Astellas Pharma, a Toyko-based pharmaceutical research and development company – was a new investor. Founding seed investor Sofinnova Partners, which led a £4.5m seed funding round in October 2009, also contributed.

Company
Headquartered in Cambridge, Crescendo is focused on the discovery and development of human VH antibody fragment therapeutics through its transgenics platform. VH domains are the smallest, most robust antibody fragments and are used in tissue and tumour penetration.

Crescendo has engineered a type of mouse that generates human VH without mouse anitbody light-chain contamination. A light chain is a polypeptide chain (a long and unbranched chain of amino acid molecules) that forms part of an antibody.

The company was founded in 2008 and has 16 employees.

People
Mike Romanos is CEO of Crescendo. Peter Pack is a partner at EMBL.