Takeda Ventures was among the participants in a $46.5m round closed nearly a year after its parent company launched a partnership with the Institut Curie spinout.
Egle Therapeutics, a France-based T-cell therapy developer spun out of Institut Curie, closed a €40m ($46.5m) series A round late last month that included Takeda Ventures, the strategic investment arm of pharmaceutical firm Takeda.
Public investment bank Bpifrance’s InnoBio 2 fund co-led the round with life sciences investment firm LSP, and it also featured venture capital fund Fund+ and investment firm Bioqube Ventures.
Egle is working on immunotherapies designed to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases by targeting immune suppressor regulatory T-cells (Tregs). Spun out in 2020, it formed a research partnership with Takeda in November the same year.
Takeda Ventures senior partner Sacha Mann has taken a board seat at Egle alongside Felice Verduyn-van Weegen and Vincent Brichard of LSP and Jean-Francois Morin of InnoBio 2, while Philippe Monteyne of Fund+, Jacques Mizrahi of Bioqube Ventures and Elisa El Nouchi of InnoBio 2 are taking board observer roles.
Luc Boblet, Egle’s co-founder and chief executive, said: “The funding will give us appropriate resources to push the first Treg starvers into the clinic and we feel very privileged to undertake such responsibility for the benefit of the whole patient community.”
– A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global Corporate Venturing.
