Düsseldorf, 14 October 2021 – Abalos Therapeutics today announced an expansion of its Series A financing. This increases the company’s financing volume of the round to €43M ($50M). The expansion round was led by Seventure Partners, with support from Coparion, Ventura BioMed Investors and Hx Bio Ventures and participation from existing Series A investors Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF), Gründerfonds Ruhr, NRW.BANK and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). The financing round underlines the great potential of Abalos’ unique immuno-virotherapy approach, which is designed to generate a maximally effective immune response that specifically targets a patient’s tumour, including possible metastases. The funding will enable the company to validate its first product candidate in a Phase 1/2 study in various solid tumours. This will include analysis in dose expansion cohorts to demonstrate early signs of clinical efficacy. In addition, the funds will be used to further expand the pipeline.
“Since the completion of our initial Series A round, we have made great progress in the development of our product candidates. We have also built a leadership team of drug development and immuno-oncology experts to support us in our goal to help patients with our unique therapeutic approach,” said Dr Marcus Kostka, CEO of Abalos Therapeutics. “With the support of our new and existing investors, we will advance our arenavirus-based lead program into the clinical validation phase with the goal of establishing clinical efficacy.”
“Abalos is developing an impressive new class of immuno-virotherapeutics for the treatment of cancer. Its product candidates have the potential to treat a range of solid cancers and to increase the efficacy of approved immuno-oncology drugs,” said Annegret de Baey, Venture Partner at Seventure Partners.
“We are excited to see such a differentiated therapeutic approach in the current highly competitive immuno-oncology field. We are therefore pleased to support the Abalos team in the further development of their pipeline candidates that could significantly improve the immune system’s ability to identify difficult-to-treat tumours and induce a long-lasting anti-tumour response against them,” added Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO and Managing Partner at Seventure.
Abalos was founded in October 2019 with the aim of developing a technology platform that exploits the unique anti-tumour properties of the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). Through its proprietary fast-evolution platform, Abalos generates virus variants with optimised anti-tumour properties that elicit a highly precise and targeted immune response that can also fight distant metastases and enable long-term disease control.
In conjunction with the expanded Series A financing round, Annegret de Baey of Seventure Partners and Sebastian Pünzeler of Coparion will join the Abalos board of directors.