Date: 2016-03-22
Type of information: Series A financing round
Company: Topas Therapeutics (Germany)
Investors: Evotec (Germany) Epidarex Capital (UK) EMBL Ventures (Germany)GIMV (Belgium)
Amount: € 14 million
Funding type: series A financing round
Planned used: Evotec has formed a spin-off company in the field of nanoparticle-based therapeutics to treat immunological disorders. The new company, Topas Therapeutics aims to build a unique pipeline of clinical-stage development projects to treat autoimmune diseases. The company is based on a proprietary nanoparticle platform which supports antigen-specific tolerance induction for multiple indications. The proceeds of the Series A funding enable Topas to expand and accelerate its proprietary liver-based tolerance induction platform and to progress with its own product development efforts in multiple autoimmune and inflammatory indications including multiple sclerosis into clinical proof-of-concept stage. Topas emerges from the neuro portfolio of Bionamics which was acquired by Evotec in March 2014 and is an early stage therapeutics company using ground breaking nanoparticle technology to target autoimmune and inflammatory diseases via the induction of antigen specific immune tolerance in the liver. The platform has been exclusively licensed from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf ("UKE") where it was invented by Johannes Herkel, Jörg Heeren and other colleagues in Hamburg. It is anticipated that Topas will advance their initial programme targeting multiple sclerosis into clinical development in 2017.
Others: * On March 22, 2016, Evotec announced that Epidarex Capital, EMBL Ventures and Gimv participated together with Evotec in the € 14 m ($ 15.75 m) Series A round of Topas Therapeutics GmbH. Evotec will remain the largest shareholder after the financing round. The new company is led by Dr Timm Jessen.
Therapeutic area: Autoimmune diseases
