Pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingelheim led a $30m series B round for France-based eye disease therapy developer Eyevensys yesterday through its Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) unit.
BPIfrance, Pontifax Venture Capital, CapDecisif, Global Health Sciences Fund, Pureos Bioventures and Inserm Transfert Initiative, the tech transfer arm of research institute Inserm, also participated in the round.
Founded in 2008, Eyevensys is developing gene therapies for retinal and ophthalmological diseases. Its approach involves injecting the eye’s ciliary muscle with DNA plasmids, enabling therapeutic proteins to be secreted to the back of the eye using an electric pulse-driven technique called electroporation.
The series B capital will fund clinical development of Eyevensys’s lead candidate, EY606, which is being targeted at non-infectious uveitis, a condition characterised by inflamed tissue in the uvea, the vascular middle layer of the eye. It is shortly set to enter a second phase 2 clinical trial.
The cash will also drive development of preclinical candidates including EYS611, a treatment for both age-related macular degeneration, which causes progressive vision loss, particularly in patients over 50 years old; and a genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa that is often characterised by diminished night vision.
Neena Kadaba, director of science at Quark Venture, one of Global Health Sciences Fund’s backers, has joined the company’s board of directors together with Dominik Escher, managing partner at Pureos Bioventures.
Eyevensys closed a $10m series A round in 2016 that was led by Pontifax Venture Capital and backed by BIVF, BPIfrance, CapDecisif and Inserm Transfert Initiative.
The latter three investors had already provided $2.1m in seed capital for the company in 2012, BPIfrance investing through its biotech-oriented fund, Innobio.
The original version of this story appeared on our sister sister site, Global University Venturing.