Nan Fung Life Sciences’ Pivotal BioVenture Partners co-led a $35m extension to the cancer therapy developer’s series A round.
US-based cancer therapy developer Plexium has added $35m from investors including property development group Nan Fung’s biotech subsidiary, Nan Fung Life Sciences, to a series A round that now totals $63m.
Nan Fung Life Sciences’ Pivotal BioVenture Partners vehicle co-led the extension with venture capital firm Lux Capital, investing alongside The Column Group, Data Collective’s DCVC Bio vehicle and unnamed existing backers.
The $28m first tranche was co-led by DCVC Bio and The Column Group in late 2019 and included M Ventures, a corporate venturing subsidiary of pharmaceutical firm Merck Group, as well as CRV and Neotribe Ventures.
Plexium is developing protein degrading therapies to treat cancer and other serious diseases. Its DELPhe platform can screen and identify small molecules used in the modulation of a protein known as the E3 ligase, which can reduce protein levels in a cell.
The company will use the new funding to advance its lead drug candidate through the preclinical development stage and support its research efforts.
Rob Hopfner, managing partner of Pivotal BioVentures, has joined Plexium’s board of directors along with Lux Capital partner Adam Goulburn while industry veteran Mike Grey has joined the company as chairman.
Hopfner said: “Plexium stood out from other companies in the space in the creative application of DEL technology to enable very high speed and throughput discovery of protein degraders with more diverse mechanisms of action and better drug-like properties than the current state of the art.”
