Calculus Capital invests £2m in Oxford BioTherapeutics
London, 3rd August 2018:
Calculus Capital, the award-winning Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trust (VCT) specialist, has invested £2m in Oxford BioTherapeutics (OBT), a clinical-stage oncology company that is developing next-generation cancer treatments.
OBT has a strong pipeline of ‘immune-oncology’ (IO) therapies that are intended to provide more targeted, specialised treatment strategies for patients by recruiting the body’s immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. Patients who would benefit would include those who have not responded to other treatments, as well as those diagnosed with advanced cancers.
Additionally, OBT has two unique development platforms, employed to support the company’s own discovery of new therapies, as well as being used by leading pharmaceutical companies. The OBT IO Discovery platform, one of the largest proteomics* databases in the world, provides unique insights into immune-oncology processes and how they work. The second platform comprises a library of tumour cultures to enable rapid testing of tumours.
Working in collaboration with The Menarini Group, Italy’s largest pharmaceutical company, OBT currently has two programmes in Phase I clinical trials. The first centres on Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, with the second focused across a number of cancers including breast, bladder and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
The investment from Calculus will be used by OBT, which has its headquarters in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, to prepare the IO pre-clinical pipeline for clinical development, as well as funding the development of further therapeutic leads.
Alexandra Lindsay, Investment Director at Calculus Capital, said: “Oxford BioTherapeutics has an impressive team of international immune-oncology experts and is already generating revenue through its relationships with global pharmaceutical companies, including The Menarini Group and Boehringer Ingelheim.
“As well as this, the company has four new drug treatments currently in the pre-clinical stage of development. Our investment will be used to primarily move these drugs to the next stage, which is clinical trials.”
Dr Christian Rohlff, Chief Executive Officer at Oxford BioTherapeutics, said: “This is a key phase in the growth of Oxford BioTherapeutics and we are delighted to have the support of Calculus. They are investors with an impressive track record of advising and mentoring growing entrepreneurial companies and have substantial experience in the life sciences arena.”
*Proteomics is the study of the proteome, which is the complete set of proteins expressed by an organism, tissue or cell. This includes the study of changes in protein expression patterns related to diseases.