UPMC Enterprises, the commercialisation and venture capital arm of insurer and healthcare provider University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, co-led a €44.5m ($52.8m) funding round for France-based ocular therapy developer SparingVision on Wednesday.
The round was co-led by investment firm 4Bio Capital and included BPIfrance, Foundation Fighting Blindness, Jeito Capital and Ysios Capital.
Incubated by research centre Vision Institute’s incubator, Incubateur Voir & Entendre, in 2016, SparingVision is working on gene therapies for blinding retinal disorders. Its lead drug candidate, SPVN06, is being developed to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a common inherited eye disease that can cause vision loss.
The cash will help advance SPVN06, which is intended to be resistant to retinitis pigmentosa mutations, as well as supporting good manufacturing practice for the company’s initial batch production and regulatory submissions in the United States and European Union.
SparingVision will also use the funding to conduct phase 1 trials, which are set to begin next year, and increase the size of its management team.
The company received $2.8m of non-dilutive funding from EIC Accelerator, a small and medium-sized enterprise-focused accelerator scheme run by the European Commission’s European Innovation Council, in July 2019. It had won the grand prize at i-Lab, an innovation competition operated by BPIfrance, in 2017.
