Financing from renowned Nordic investors
Anocca AB, a leader in unlocking the potential of T-cell immunotherapy to deliver transformative therapeutics for cancer, today announced the closing of a USD 47 million (SEK 400 million) Series B financing to further advance the company’s industrialised cellular biology platform and progress its pipeline of TCR-T cellular therapies into Phase I/IIa clinical trials.
The financing, led by advisor Danske Bank, brings together a distinguished group of investors, with Swedbank Robur Ny Teknik, Ramsbury Invest and significant family offices including those of Harald Mix and Robert Andreen joining existing investors including Mellby Gård, Nidoco and co-founder Mikael Blomqvist via Michano.
Anocca’s CEO and co-founder Reagan Jarvis, said, “This financing round, which takes us to well over $100m raised since our founding in 2014, is further strong endorsement of our pioneering approach to industrialised high-precision analysis of T-cell biology. The team has built and operationalised an industry-leading suite of unique technologies to generate efficient and systematic TCR-T cell therapy pipelines. We will use this substantial financing to accelerate our broad oncology pipeline into the clinic with our in-house manufacturing capabilities. We continue to methodically move towards our vision of delivering blockbuster franchises of next generation T-cell immunotherapies for the treatment of multiple cancer types.”
The company’s highly industrialised cellular biology platform replicates human T-cell biology in the laboratory, to generate targeted T-cell therapies with broad applicability in oncology, infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. The technology platform is comprised of a number of proprietary cell biology and molecular genetics technologies and enables the scalable high-precision analysis needed to develop highly targeted therapeutics that leverage T-cell immunity. The platform is underpinned by proprietary, fully integrated, information management and bioinformatic software tools developed in-house.
Anocca’s platform has delivered a broad pipeline of T-cell receptor (TCR) assets to generate novel TCR-modified T-cell therapies (TCR-T) against multiple antigen classes, including targets that are shared amongst tumours, against specific genetic mutations that drive cancer, and against viruses that cause cancer. TCR-T cellular therapies can unlock an immense target space inaccessible to biologics and CAR-T therapies and is emerging as an important treatment modality for many forms of cancer.
Anocca’s Chairman of the board and early investor, Hans Stråberg said, “To deliver on the potential of new technologies you need to have the infrastructure in place to secure scaling. This is exactly what we have done with Anocca, by taking a systematic approach to building a broad industrialised platform with extensive automation and software tools, in addition to our own cGMP manufacturing facility, allowing us to drive multiple clinical programmes in parallel. This is an outstanding success for European life sciences, with Anocca emerging as a global scientific and technical leader in the field of TCR-T cell immunotherapy.”
Lars Hevreng, Financial Advisor at Danske Bank said, “We are delighted to bring together a distinguished syndicate of investors to back Anocca’s further development. The company’s long-term and very strong financial backing will now become even stronger, which will be very important for Reagan and his team to fully pursue their ambitious targets of unlocking the therapeutic potential of Anocca’s TCR-T cell immunotherapy approach.”
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