ObsEva, a Switzerland-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to women’s reproductive medicine and focused mainly on therapies for preterm labour, announced at the end of August that it had closed a CHF32m ($34.4m) series A financing round led by life sciences-focused venture capital firms Sofinnova Partners and Sofinnova Ventures, and also by Novo A/S, the asset management holding company within Novo Group, a Denmark-based group of healthcare companies.
Concurrently, ObsEva has signed a licensing agreement with Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical division of Germany-based pharmaceutical, chemical and life science company Merck. Under the terms of the deal, Merck Serono will grant ObsEva worldwide development and commercialization rights to certain Merck Serono compounds in the field of preterm labour. The series A funding will allow ObsEva to undertake the development of these compounds. As part of the deal, MS Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of Merck Serono, has taken a minority equity stake in the company.
Jasper Bos will represent MS Ventures at ObsEva’s board of directors, which will also include Rafaèle Tordjman, managing partner at Sofinnova Partners, Jim Healy, general partner at Sofinnova Ventures, and Kim Dueholm, partner at Novo A/S.
Ernest Loumaye, chief executive officer of ObsEva, said: “I am grateful to Merck Serono for the trust in ObsEva for developing the licensed assets. Preterm labour is a condition for which only products with limited efficacy or limiting safety are available. The cost of preterm births to the society is estimated at around 27 billion dollars every year in the USA.”
ObsEva was founded in November 2012 by Ernest Loumaye and André Chollet, who was responsible for the preterm labour program at Serono before the acquisition of the company by Merck.