Asahi Kasei Pharmaceuticals, a Japan-based drugs company, has acquired a company it had incubated before handing over to venture capital firms to develop as a way to share costs and risks in developing innovative molecules for potential therapies.
Asahi Kasei Pharmaceuticals, a Japan-based drugs company, has acquired a company it had incubated before handing over to venture capital firms to develop as a way to share costs and risks in developing innovative molecules for potential therapies.
Artisan Pharma, a US-based biotech company to treat people with blood poisoning, had originally been spun out of Asahi Kasei in 2006 with $39m in venture funding by NovaQuest (the corporate venturing unit of Quintiles), New Leaf Partners, NGN Capital,Jafco Ventures and Bio*One Capital (which invests on behalf of the Singapore state’s EDBI unit), and sold back to the Japanese company for an undisclosed amount. Artisan raised $22m in its series B round in March last year and a further $4m four months later.
Graeme Martin, head of Takeda Ventures, a corporate venturing unit of Asahi’s Japanese peer, said: "I like this type of proposition, where VC money can be used together with corporate assets as a cost- and risk-shared approach to developing interesting molecules. Generally, all done with pore-agreed commercial terms around the buyback option, so everyone’s a winner."
VC firm Atlas Ventures recently started a group to do just this called Atlas Venture Development Corp while Velocity was formed by VC peer NEA Ventures for something similar.
