Date: 2013-11-04
Type of information: Series B financing round
Company: Hookipa Biotech (Austria)
Investors: BioMedPartners (Switzerland), Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (Germany), Forbion Capital Partners (The Netherlands), Sofinnova Partners (France), Takeda Ventures (Japan)
Amount: €20 million
Funding type: series B financing round
Planned used: Hookipa has developed Vaxwave®, a novel and proprietary viral vector platform with exquisite capacity for the stimulation of antibody and CD8+ T cell immunity. The Company’s lead product candidate based on this platform, HB101, is a vaccine against cytomegalovirus (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 AG, a company pioneering a new class of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines, has 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.
The Company 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. This financing brings the total equity finance raised by Hookipa to €27 million. It announced a series A investment of €7 million in October 2011.
Hookipa Biotech AG is developing a new class of vaccines based on its proprietary Vaxwave® technology. The Vaxwave® technology is a novel vaccine platform using a replication-defective viral vector for the prevention and treatment of multiple infectious diseases and cancer. It has been validated in various disease models. Unlike other vectors, Vaxwave® vaccines can be administered repeatedly to boost the immune system. The Company is focused on the development of its lead vaccine candidate HB101, a vaccine for immunization against cytomegalovirus (CMV) and plans to further industrialize the Vaxwave® technology and build a robust product pipeline in the area of infectious diseases and cancer.
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology - Infectious diseases
