Antibody company Kymab raises $40 million in series B
Kymab Ltd. (Cambridge, U.K.) raised $40 million in a series B round from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a new investor, and the Wellcome Trust, an existing investor. The investors split the round equally. The Gates Foundation said the investment is the biggest through its investment arm, the Program-Related Investments (PRI) initiative. Kymab and the foundation also said on Friday that they partnered to discover and develop vaccines and therapeutic mAbs, with an initial focus on malaria and HIV (see BioCentury, July 16, 2012).
Kymab is using its Kymouse genomically engineered mouse technology to develop a pipeline of optimized mAbs in oncology, autoimmune and "opportunistic" therapeutic spaces. The company has two lead compounds slated to enter the clinic in 2016 for graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). ...