While the rest of us were at leisure, it’s been a busy time in European biotech, with a string of new company formations, funding rounds and licensing deals announced over the past five to six weeks.
These have ranged from big ticket partnerships like that between the Austrian antibody engineering specialist F-Star and pharma company Merck Serono which boasted a headline value of €492 million, to small financings such as the €2.5 million follow-on round announced by Pharnext, a French start-up that is applying systems biology to find new uses for marketed drugs.
The F-Star deal, under which it will work to discover novel antibodies against inflammatory diseases targets supplied by Merck Serono, highlights how pharma’s R&D productivity problems and the ongoing restructuring of research operations continue to dominate partnering activity in the sector. Antibodies are now established as a valuable class of drugs and pharma companies are anxious to bolster their pipelines with novel formats that are emerging from research-based companies like F-Star.
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Author: Nuala Moran
