Date: 2013-11-04
Type of information: Series B financing round
Company: Hoopika Biotech (Austria)
Investors: Sofinnova Partners (France) Forbion Capital Partners (The Netherlands) Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (Germany) Takeda Ventures (USA - CA) BioMedPartners (Switzerland)
Amount: €20 million ($27.5 million)
Funding type: series B financing round
Planned used: The funds will be used to progress viral vaccine pipeline and to explore applications in cancer immunotherapy. Hookipa has developed Vaxwave®, a novel and proprietary viral vector platform with capacity for the stimulation of antibody and CD8+ T cell immunity. Hoopika’s lead product candidate based on this platform, HB101, is a vaccine against ytomegalovirus (CMV) that is currently in advanced pre-clinical development and testing. The new investment will be used to progress HB101 into Phase I clinical testing and to further industrialize Vaxwave® technology, both for partnering and for building a robust product pipeline in the area of infectious diseases and cancer.
Hookipa’s Vaxwave® technology exhibits great potential for cancer immunotherapy, since Vaxwave® vectors are not inhibited by anti-vector immunity and can be repeatedly administered for stimulating potent CD8+ T cell responses against tumor targets. The series B financing will thus also be used to explore applications for novel cancer therapies.
Others: * On November 4, 2013, Hookipa Biotech announced that it has raised €20 million ($27.5 million) in a series B equity financing. Existing investors Sofinnova Partners and Forbion Capital Partners led the financing with three new investors, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Takeda Ventures and BioMedPartners joining the round. Hoopika Biotech also welcomes Dr. Frank Kalkbrenner from the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund as a new member of the company’s Supervisory Board and Dr. Yuji Iizawa from Takeda Ventures and Dr. Markus Hosang from BioMedPartners as Observers.
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology - Infectious diseases
