Pheast, Apertura and Reify Health are BioSpace’s top financial winners this week. Read on to see what money can do!
Money this week helped launch several new companies, such as novel cancer checkpoint therapy company Pheast Therapeutics and gene therapy company Apertura, and helped one company to an IPO.
Pheast Therapeutics
Pheast Therapeutics, a new player in the novel cancer checkpoint therapy space, launched on April 26 with a $76 million Series A financing. Pheast’s vision is to achieve a macrophage revolution through precision cancer immunotherapy. With the funding, Pheast will not only expand its headcount and advance its cancer therapeutics pipeline but will also hone in on immunotherapy options. In particular, the company wants to create a treatment that targets protein CD24, which cancers frequently use to avoid being eaten by macrophage cells. If Pheast can create a therapy that marks CD24, the body’s macrophages can attack and kill cancer cells.
RVAC Medicines
Singapore-based RVAC Medicines closed a series B financing, bringing the company’s total funding to about $140 million since its inception in June 2021. RVAC focuses on creating vaccines and other therapies for unmet diseases, and it’s starting with mRNA vaccines.
“In particular, this investment will accelerate the development of a highly effective multivalent COVID vaccine that could offer enhanced protection against future variants, as well as further mRNA innovations for other infectious diseases, auto-immune diseases and cancers,” said Sean Fu, CEO of RVAC.
Aclarion
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) company Aclarion, based in San Mateo, CA, went public Tuesday, closing $9.4 million in an IPO. The company offered 2,165,000 shares of common stock and an equal number of warrants to purchase those stocks. Each share was sold with a warrant to purchase stock at a price at $4.35 per share. The sole book-running manager in connection with the offering was Maxim Group, LLC.
The healthtech company combines MRS, artificial intelligence and a proprietary biomarker in a platform that looks to address the $134.5 billion low back and neck pain market in the U.S.
Apertura Gene Therapy
Apertura Gene Therapy was officially born Tuesday with a solid Series A financing. The funding, all from Deerfield Management Company, totaled $67 million, with a commitment of additional operational support in the future. Apertura is developing ways to overcome the limitations of current gene therapies, such as engineering AAV capsids and payloads to expand the potential for gene expression and pre-existing immunity.
The New York-based biotech’s full-stack platform technologies are the brainchildren of Ben Deverman of the Broad Institute and Harvard’s Michael Greenberg.
“When developing a gene therapy, it has been common to use naturally occurring serotype AAV capsids. The technology we have developed uses proprietary assays and machine learning to design custom AAV capsids that have the chosen characteristics for treating specific diseases, and we believe this approach will result in new and effective gene therapies,” Deverman said in a press release.
Reify Health
Boston-based Reify Health announced a significant $220 million Series D financing led by investors such as Altimeter Capital, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, ICONIQ Growth, Adams Street and Battery Ventures. The Series D brings Reify’s total valuation to $4.8 billion. The funding will help Reify continue its quest to improve diversity in clinical trials.
With its new Bringing Representation, Inclusion and Diversity to Global Enrollment (BRIDGE) initiative, Reify has added a diversity reporting capability to its StudyTeam enrollment management platform. This new effort hopes to help life sciences companies recruit and retain participants that are more representative of target populations.
Mendel Group
Clinical artificial intelligence and natural language processing platform Mendel Group announced a $40 million Series B financing round. Led by Oak HC/FT, the funding will support Mendel Group in expanding its AI and engineering teams, as well as help launch a new product, Resolve, a software that consolidates clinical information. Normally, clinical consolidation software would take about five years to manually abstract information from 2 million patient lives - but Mendel’s Resolve claims to be able to do it in less than 24 hours.
“Mendel’s technology sets a new standard in accuracy and scalability for processing unstructured medical data,” said Billy Deitch, partner at Oak HC/FT.
