Funding
arGEN-X BV, set up last year to commercialise a new technology for the discovery of human antibody drugs, has announced the first closing of its funding round at €9.5 million The deal was co-led by the Dutch venture capital firms Forbion Capital Partners and Life Sciences Partners.
Christina Takke for Forbion Capital Partners and John de Koning for LSP have joined the arGEN-X Supervisory Board. Other members of the syndicate are KBC Private Equity of Belgium, BioGeneration Ventures of the Netherlands and existing shareholders, the Erasmus MC Biomedical Fund and Thuja Capital Healthcare Funds.
arGEN-X will use the proceeds to further develop its proprietary SIMPLE Antibody technology platform to build a proprietary pre-clinical antibody product portfolio. The company claims that the SIMPLE platform yields monoclonal antibodies which combine an unparalleled 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 starting affinities and potencies without the need for further engineering.
Peter Verhaeghe, Chairman of the Board of arGEN-X said, “We are very pleased with this significant equity financing, one of the largest early stage investments in our sector in the past year. arGEN-X’s ability to raise this significant financing from such a high-quality investor syndicate in a very difficult financial market is a strong vote of confidence in and a testimony to the tremendous value creation potential of the company and its team.”
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