Phenex Pharmaceuticals, a Germany-based drug discovery and development company, has closed its series C round at €6m ($7.8m).
Phenex has raised €17.2m since 2005 from local investment bank Equinet’s EVP Capital Management subsidiary; state funds KfW and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg; venture capital firm Creathor Venture; European insurer Swiss Life; CD-Venture, the venture capital firm run by Christoph Boehringer, and private angel investors.
Mathias Boehringer, member of Phenex’ś supervisory board, said: "Phenex has picked up novel research ideas such as FXR agonists for metabolic and liver diseases or RORgt inhibitors for autoimmune diseases and has been among the first companies worldwide to turn these ideas into concrete compound development programs with very good preclinical results.
"The FXR project will go into Phase I in the course of the next six months. We, as private investors from the Boehringer family [which founded local pharmaceutical giant Boehringer-Ingelheim], are glad to invest into this company which is a nearly perfect and commercially very promising showcase for an effective approach in translational medicine."