Denmark-based pharmaceutical firm Novo announced on Monday that its Repair Impact Fund is shifting strategy to support more portfolio companies at a later stage.
The corporate launched the fund in early 2018 with $165m and a brief to invest $20m to $40m per year in drug developers looking to target antimicrobial resistance over three to five years.
Repair Impact Fund had committed $22m of its capital as of January 2019 and said this week it has allocated a total of $48m across eight companies having viewed in excess of 150 project proposals.
The vehicle will now reserve capital to support portfolio companies through phase 2 drug development, though it will continue to invest in new companies at an earlier stage.
Aleks Engel, partner at Novo unit Novo Seeds, said: “Based on experiences to date, we may slow down our early investments slightly in order to potentially advance projects further. Simultaneously we will now also consider proposals from anywhere on the globe and are very much looking forward to seeing those.”
The fund has also disclosed two new investments. It has provided €7m ($7.8m) in funding for Mutabilis, a France-based developer of treatments for Gram-negative infections, and $3.9m for IBT Vaccines, a US-based company working on a vaccine for a Gram-positive bacterium known as staphylococcus aureus.
