February was a busy month for significant venture capital financings, with $483m raised by 15 biopharmaceutical companies, including a $33m Series A round for start-up Surrozen Inc., which is developing drugs targeting Wnt ligands to promote the repair and regeneration of human tissues.
Finance Watch: Surrozen Raises $33m In $483m February Flurry; Also, Are Reverse Mergers This Year's IPOs?
Surrozen raised $33m to fund drug development programs targeting Wnt ligands for various indications during a February VC financing flurry that occurred despite a drop in IPOs. Taking an alternative route to going public, some biopharma companies have completed reverse mergers in recent weeks and months.
More from Financing
• By
Public Company Edition: Stock valuations are falling due to political, economic and regulatory uncertainty, resulting in fewer large public offerings, more alternative financings and cost cuts. Carisma, Tenaya, BioAtla, Arbutus, Nkarta, Alector and Adaptimmune announced layoffs.
• By
CEO Kris Elverum told Scrip about the start-up’s platform for editing RNA to correct genetic variants that cause harm and to reproduce healthy variants as a means of treating disease.
• By
The four-year-old firm said it plans to advance programs toward the clinic from the funding round, which comes just over a year after signing two major pharma partnerships.
• By
Private Company Edition: The latest group of drug developers to announce venture capital financings is remarkable for its geographic diversity, from Character Biosciences’ $93m series B round in the US to Augustine’s $85m series B in Belgium to a $29.2m series C for Aculys in Japan.
More from Business
• By
The German firm’s chairman, Hubertus von Baumbach, is adopting a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to the threat of pharma tariffs.
• By
Trump announced a 26% reciprocal tariff on India but a country-agnostic exemption of pharmaceuticals implies that the interests of Indian firms and the US consumer are protected for now. What is Indian pharma’s business exposure and what is domestic industry saying?
• By
Industry lobbied for pharmaceuticals to be exempt from Trump’s sweeping US tariffs and the effort appears to have paid off. J&J, Lilly and Merck & Co. even got shout outs.