Crescendo Biologics secures £17.5m series-A

Ellie Pullen
18 December 2013

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UK biotech Crescendo Biologics has raised ТЃ17.5m in its series-A funding round from Imperial Innovations, Astellas Venture Management (AVM) and existing investor Sofinnova Partners.

Imperial led the round, contributing £6.5m to the total. In exchange, the firm now holds a 26.9% stake in the company.

Crescendo will use the substantial capital injection to further develop its inflammation and oncology programmes through its VH antibody fragment discovery platform. VH fragments are small, robust antibody fragments with the potential to play a part in tissue and tumour penetration.

The company also plans on doubling its workforce next year.

AVM is the corporate venture arm of Astellas Pharma, a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical research and development company.

Previous funding
In October 2009, Sofinnova led a £4.5m seed funding round for Crescendo alongside Aitua, Avlar BioVentures and the Midven-managed Rainbow Seed Fund. Sofinnova invested in the company via its €260m Sofinnova Capital VI fund, according to unquote" data.

Company
Founded in 2008, Crescendo is headquartered in Cambridge and employs 16 staff. The company is developing human VH antibody fragment therapeutics for the treatment of oncology and inflammation.

At the beginning of 2013, the company announced the creation of the Crescendo Mouse - a transgenic mouse that generates human VH without any mouse antibody 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 created the Crescendo Mouse by first developing a "triple knockout" (TKO) mouse in which all three murine (rodent) immunoglobulin light chains are silenced.

Crescendo claims that, because of the lack of light chain contamination, the Crescendo Mouse generates human VH with superior properties for drug development.

People
Mike Romanos is the CEO of Crescendo. The company's board of directors includes Sofinnova partner Graziano Seghezzi and Rob Woodman, director of healthcare investments at Imperial. Sakae Asanuma is the president and CEO of AVM.