US-based cancer drug developer VelosBio closed a $137m series B round yesterday that included pharmaceutical firm Takeda’s corporate venturing unit, Takeda Ventures.
Hedge fund manager Matrix Capital Management co-led the round with Surveyor Capital, a subsidiary of investment manager Citadel. It increased VelosBio’s overall funding to $202m since it was founded in 2017, the company said.
The round included Adage Capital Management, Cormorant Asset Management, Farallon, Foresite Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Logos Capital, OrbiMed, Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors, Wellington Management, Arix Bioscience, Decheng Capital, Pappas Capital, Sofinnova Ventures and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.
VelosBio’s lead product candidate is an antibody-drug conjugate known as VLS-101 that is in a phase 1 clinical trial for relapsed or refractory haematologic cancers. It plans to initiate a clinical trial for the candidate in solid tumours later this year.
The company is developing drugs to target the orphan receptor 1 surface antigen of a class of cell signalling molecules called tyrosine kinases that are expressed by certain kinds of cancers, theoretically enabling therapeutics to locate and bind to cancerous cells.
Arix Bioscience and Sofinnova Ventures co-led VelosBio’s $58m series A round in late 2018, investing with Takeda Ventures, Pappas Ventures, Decheng Capital and Chiesi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of pharmaceutical company Chiesi.
Takeda Ventures and Decheng Capital were named as existing backers in the series A round, which followed $7.7m in funding earlier in the year, according to a securities filing. VelosBio has also taken part in medical products group Johnson & Johnson’s JLabs accelerator.
