US-based healthcare company ImaginAb has raised $21m in a series B round led by Mérieux Développement, the corporate venturing subsidiary of French biomedical holdings company Institut Mérieux.
The round also included Novartis Venture Funds, the corporate venturing unit of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, and venture capital firms Cycad Group and Nextech Invest. All participants in the latest round were returning investors.
ImaginAbB previously raised $12.5m in a series A round in May 2012 led by Momentum Biosciences, a seed stage investment fund formed by faculty at US universities Caltech and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
In October 2011 it received $2.3m in seed funding from the National Cancer Institute’s Small Business Innovation programme.
Spun out of UCLA in 2007, ImaginAB’s technology reengineers antibodies into smaller proteins suitable for diagnostic imagining. It is working with more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies to develop imaging agents to accompany therapeutic antibody drugs, with a focus on types of prostate and pancreatic cancer.
Christian Behrenbruch, CEO of ImaginAb, said the funds raised in this latest round will be used: “to accelerate the development of IAB2M, our lead programme in prostate cancer, and continue to expand our product pipeline.”