It’s a cliché of the pharmaceutical industry. While Big Pharma rakes in billions of euros from the sale of a few star drugs, nearly 70% of the therapeutic innovations under development in the world originate from biotech, of which few are outside the United States, which manage to get a few tens of millions of euros from investors to carry out their projects.
This curiosity of the sector makes the announcement, Monday, June 13, of the record fundraising carried out by the French biotech ImCheck Therapeutics all the more singular. The Marseille company, specializing in immunotherapy, has just signed a financing of 96 million euros with venture capitalists. An amount worthy of American rounds, even though the health biotech sector has been shunned by investors in recent months.
Enough to give wings to the young shoot of the Marseille city, brought to the baptismal font in 2015 by Professor Daniel Olive, doctor of medicine and holder of a doctorate in immunology, who notably heads the immunity and cancer team at the cancer research center in Marseille. The biotech thus concludes its third fundraising in five years. “ It’s good news. This shows that Europe is making progress in financing biotech. The sector has suffered for too long from a lack of capital. But you can’t conduct robust clinical trials and product development with bits of string. », underlines Raphaël Wisniewski at Andera Partners, who participated in the funding round alongside, among others, the German Earlybird, Bpifrance and Pfizer Ventures.
A success that ImCheck Therapeutics owes in particular to its innovative work on gamma delta T lymphocytes, a field of human biology until now under-studied by researchers, and which could however, according to the Marseille biotech, be an element- key in the treatment of many serious pathologies such as cancers. In concrete terms, these cells, once activated, make it possible to amplify the response of the immune system, responsible for attacking and killing cancer cells. It is still necessary to be able to awaken the “superpowers” of these cells. To achieve this, the company is developing a new generation antibody whose mission is to target butyrophilins – receptors which, in turn, trigger the response of these famous gamma delta T cells.
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