arGEN-X closes first round at €12.5M

Funding

Antibody specialist arGEN-X BV, has announced the successful second closing of its first funding round, raising an additional €3 million from Crédit Agricole Private Equity and VIB, in the first external investment by the Flemish research institute.

This means arGEN-X has raised a total of €12.5million in a round it says was heavily oversubscribed.  

The round was co-led by Forbion Capital Partners and Life Sciences Partners, both of the Netherlands. Other members of the syndicate were KBC Private Equity of Belgium, BioGeneration Ventures, the Netherlands and existing shareholders Erasmus MC Biomedical Fund and Thuja Capital Healthcare Funds.

arGEN-X will use the proceeds to further develop its proprietary, SIMPLE Antibody engine and to continue to build a proprietary pre-clinical antibody product portfolio. The company says its SIMPLE Antibody platform yields monoclonal antibodies that combine functional diversity against human disease targets with best in class human germline homology. The antibodies are generated in vivo, starting from active immunisation, and exhibit ultra-high affinity and potency without the need for further engineering.  

The arGEN-X platform has the potential to rapidly generate product candidates against novel therapeutic targets and against targets where standard antibody approaches fail to generate an optimal lead diversity.  

Tim Van Hauwermeiren, Chief Executive Officer of arGEN-X, said, “We are very pleased to have raised this additional funding from two experienced European life science investors. In addition, we are proud to become VIB’s first external investment and we view this as a real quality stamp of approval. With substantial funding now in place, arGEN-X is well positioned to execute its ambitious value-creating strategy over the next two years.”