Protagonist drives $18m story

Protagonist Therapeutics, a life sciences spin-out of Australia’s Queensland University now based in California, has announced the closing of its second tranche of an $18m series B.

The second tranche adds $4m to a previously raised $14m tranche. The first tranche was led by Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, the corporate venture capital (CVC) unit of pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson, along with Eli Lilly’s CVC arm Lilly Ventures and Australia-based Starfish Ventures, which both invested alongside QIC BioVentures in Protagonist’s $9m series A in 2006.

The second tranche came via Pharmastandard International, the holding company of Russia-based pharmaceutical firm OJSC Pharmaceutical.

Protagonist will use the funds to further develop PTG-100, the company’s drug candidate for inflammatory bowel diseases – a collection of inflammatory gastrointestinal tract conditions such as Crohn’s disease.

Dinesh Patel, CEO of Protagonist Therapeutics, said: “Securing the second tranche of our Series B financing is an acknowledgement of the progress that Protagonist Therapeutics has made in advancing not only the oral integrin blocker PTG-100, but also in creating a pipeline of additional pre-clinical stage assets such as the IL-23 receptor antagonist. These programs are based on the concept of orally stable peptide therapeutics that have the combined oral stability characteristics of small molecule drugs with the potency and specificity of large biologics in a single new chemical entity.”