Advent Life Sciences raises $215m across two new funds

The two funds have surpassed their combined initial target of $200m.

"Our fundraising has been smooth and successful despite the new challenges brought by the emergency, thanks to the strength of our team, our long and solid track record and our sector-specific investment thesis," Advent Life Sciences general partner Shahzad Malik told Unquote. "The pandemic has reminded everybody, and especially long-term-value-focused investors, that having exposure to life sciences can be extremely beneficial. That's why we have seen a substantial increase in capital flow into this sector last year and expect this trend to continue in the coming months."

Advent Life Sciences Fund III, which raised the majority of the capital, is the firm's third dedicated life sciences venture capital fund, raised from a broad group of LPs, including British Patient Capital. The fund is larger than its predecessor, Advent Life Sciences Fund II, which closed on £145.5m in 2014 and is currently all invested.

The Advent-Harrington Impact Fund was raised in collaboration with not-for-profit drug development specialist Harrington Discovery Institute at University Hospitals in Cleveland, with the aim to translate innovative drug discoveries into novel treatments.

"Advent Life Sciences Fund III and the Advent-Harrington Impact Fund invest together in the same deals, with a financially oriented combination," Malik told Unquote. "Some of the profits from the Harrington fund will then be redirected towards the Harrington Discovery Institute, to finance the next generation of discoveries. This new collaboration will allow us both to broaden the quality of investment opportunities across the globe and increase the amount of capital available to support them. We believe this translational financing is critical to the development of new medicines, and that it will deliver real impact to patients in addition to strong financial returns."

Established in 2005, Advent has a team of 16 investment professionals with scientific, medical and operational experience, based across its offices in the UK, France and the US. Since inception, the firm has founded more than 20 new biotech companies that are focused on translating academic research into medicines. 

Deals recently inked by Advent include the sale of Kandy Therapeutics to Bayer Pharmaceuticals for $875m; Advent-founded Arrakis' $190m partnership deal with Roche to develop small molecule modulators of RNA; the Nasdaq IPO of Acutus Medical; and participation in a $60m round for F2G Therapeutics.

Investors
Advent Life Sciences Fund III benefited from a high re-up rate, receiving commitments from numerous investors from previous fundraises, including several funds-of-funds, pension funds and family offices. It also attracted new LPs such as British Patient Capital, which joined the funds' LP base as a new cornerstone investor.

Investments
The two funds invest in early- and mid-stage life sciences companies that have a first- or best-in-class approach to unmet medical needs.

"We invest in what I call true venture: we source companies and ideas, often seeding them straight out of academia, and we build businesses from world class science, nurturing them and boosting their growth," Malik told Unquote. "This strategy requires technical and operational knowledge, and the ability to identify individual scientific discoveries able to make it all the way through to clinical trial, delivering products and services that have a huge impact on human health. Our funds have invested in series-A companies that currently have 14 approved medical devices and diagnostics on the market."

Targeting seed, series-A and selective later-stage deals, the vehicles are able to deploy a broad and diversified range of equity tickets, from small cheques of $500,000 in seed rounds, to larger tickets of up to $20m in bigger syndicated rounds. Their sweet spot is around $15m per company, provided along the entire life span of an investment.

"It is very important to have the capability to follow your winners, fuelling their growth and expansion plan with fresh capital," Malik told Unquote. "This is also the best way to maximise returns, by deploying as much capital as possible in the most promising best-in-class companies." 

The funds will invest 60% of their capital across Europe and the UK, and the remainder in the US. Around 80% of the capital will be deployed in pharmaceutical drug discovery, while the remaining 20% will be dedicated to investments in medical device companies.

The funds have already made a few investments in the UK, Switzerland, Finland and the US. In Finland they invested, alongside Novartis Venture Fund and Novo Holdings, in a €9m series-A for Rappta Therapeutics, which develops anti-cancer molecules that reactivate a key tumour suppressor enzyme, PP2A.

"We are currently working on some interesting new deals in the oncology and immunology sectors," Malik told Unquote. "We are also looking at some promising science platforms able to act as discovery engines by enabling the discovery of multiple innovative medicines."

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