Oxford Genome Sciences Secured Additional Private Equity Investment Round
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Oxford Genome Sciences (UK) Ltd (OGeS) has announced that it has secured additional private equity investment to accelerate the development of its exciting business.
The Oxford-based biotechnology company intends to be a leader in the development of personalised medicines for the treatment of cancer. The investment came from a syndicate of investors, led by the newly launched £30m Catapult Growth Fund, which was making its first investment from the fund.
The syndicate included the South East Growth Fund and Oxford Capital Partners, who expanded its commitment to OGeS with a significant follow-on investment.
In partnership with antibody therapeutics and diagnostics, OGeS claims that it is harnessing the largest proprietary collection of disease proteins to develop new antibody therapies for cancer.
Each therapy will be accompanied by a diagnostic allowing personalised treatment, as with the highly successful breast cancer treatment, Herceptin®.
The Company says that, this integrated drug development approach also has the ability to take significant amounts of time, money and risk out of the drug development, thus making it more cost effective to bring drugs to the market.
OGeS made progress towards this goal over the last 12 months, securing strategic partnerships with blue chip life sciences companies such as Medarex and Biosite, as well as Oxford University and the GE Healthcare consortium.
Together these agreements enable the company to co-develop new therapeutic monoclonal antibody (mAb) products for the treatment of a number of cancers including colorectal cancer (CRC) as well as a customised diagnostic product for each therapy.
Dr Christian Rohlff, CEO of Oxford Genome Sciences (UK) commented: “The additional funds that we have raised provide us with financing visibility for the next three years, which will allow OGeS to advance further our therapeutic and diagnostics cancer programmes.
We have made significant progress over the last 12 months, having secured alliances with leaders in the areas of therapeutic antibodies and protein diagnostics. This together with the support of our investors underlines the strength of our team and our ambitious growth strategy to become a key player in providing innovative new medicines in oncology with integrated diagnostics.”
