Venture capital firms are working in tandem with their corporate venturing peers to create a novel approach to investing in start-ups with UK-based Bicycle Therapeutics the vehicle to test out the ideas.
The four initial investors in Bicycle, which was spun out of the UK Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in October, include two VCs, Atlas Ventures and SV Life Sciences, and two corporate venturing funds, GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One and the Novartis Venture Fund.
The four have joined a syndicate designed to last for the lifetime of the investment without needing to be expanded, although the size of the initial investment was undisclosed.
Kate Bingham, a managing partner at SV Life Sciences, said: “We have funded Bicycle with four VCs of which two are corporates. This is a much more punchy syndicate than you would normally have for a company at this stage.”
Another member of her investment syndicate said the decision reflected a different approach to early-stage investing in a bid to avoid distracting management with the need to find future investors. However, since joining the syndicate, Atlas Ventures has pulled back from its European office and will not use it to make further new investments.
Among venture capitalists, who control the purse strings for a majority of tech start-ups, just 14% are women, according to the US National Venture Capital Association. Alongside Bingham deciding on the Bicycle investment, were three other women: Deborah Harland, a partner and head of SR One’s European investments; Regina Hodits, a venture partner in the life sciences group at Atlas Venture; and Anja Koenig, managing director of the Novartis Venture Funds.
The four are on Bicy- cle’s board as a result of their investments. The strong syndicate – comprising four of the largest investors in life sciences – was pulled together to support Bicycle in its efforts to develop a new generation of bio- therapeutics that combine the desirable features of small molecules and biopharmaceuticals to create highly specific and highly stable drugs.
The company was formed out of the ideas of scientists Sir Gregory Winter and Dr Christian Heinis, who worked together at the Cambridge laboratory from 2006. Sir Gregory was the British pioneer of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies that led to the creation of Cambridge Antibody Technology, one of the early commercial biotech companies involved in antibody engineering before AstraZeneca bought it for £702m ($1bn) in 2006, and Domantis, which was also acquired in 2006 but by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for £230m.
While the scientists develop their thera- peutics platform, Bicycle is being led by John Tite. He joined as chief executive on formation of the company from his role as vice-president and head of discovery biology for the GSK Biopharm Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery, where he established the current GSK monoclonal antibody programme.