École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-out Anokion has successfully closed its series A at CHF33m ($37.5m), with investors including life sciences venture capitalists Novartis Venture Fund, Novo Ventures and Versant Ventures, which together led the financing with additional participation by private investors.
Anokion will use the funds to develop clinical candidates in the areas of immune-masked protein therapeutics, auto-immune and allergic diseases. The company is also looking at adapting its technology to prevent immune reactions to protein drugs used to treat haemophilia and cancer. It aims to grow to ten employees and launch first clinical trials in 2017.
The company is based on research in a laboratory led by Jeffrey Hubbell, professor and founder of the Institute of Bioengineering, who managed to prevent type I diabetes in mice. White blood cells, the advance guard of the immune system, tend to calm down in the presence of red blood cells that are dying normally at the end of their life cycle. In healthy individuals this happens to about 200 million red cells each day. Hubbell attached the protein drug responsible for triggering the immune response onto red blood cells to take advantage of this calming effect. By doing this, white blood cells do not identify the protein as a foreign body and thus the undesirable immune response disappears.
The research was published in the official scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, in 2012 and received considerable attention. Anokion is Hubbell’s third biotech spin-out, having launched Focal and sold it to Genzyme in 2001 for $10m, and having launched Kuros Biosurgery in Zurich, which focuses on tissue repair. Hubbell will become a member of Anokion’s board of directors, and move on to Chicago University where he will become professor Molecular Engineering in July 2014.
Hubbell said: “The technology delivers proteins, be they auto-immune antigens or protein drugs, in a manner that re-trains the immune system to accept them as the body’s own. We are delighted that leading biotech venture funds have recognised the value of our approach, providing the necessary financial means to move forward.”
