The venture capital managers Sofinnova Partners and Asabys have led a round of 12 million euros in the biotech Nuage Therapeutics to start animal tests of the drugs it is investigating against resistant prostate cancer, the second leading cause of death related to cancer in men.
Nuage is a company that emerged from IRB Barcelona and ICREA, founded by researchers Xavier Salvatella, Mateusz Biesaga, Denes Hnisz, and Judit Anido, as executive director. Clara Campàs, managing partner of Asabys, points out that the company was established in the summer of 2021, and began to operate with participatory loans provided by Asabys itself, the CDTI and BStartup, which in this round, the first or seed, was also have become capital.
Asabys invests in Nuage through its two vehicles, the Sabadell Asabys fund and the Asabys Top Up Fund. According to Campàs, “it is a great success that we have been able to incorporate Sofinnova, which is making its first investment in Spain in Nuage, because it is one of the most prominent investors in Europe and they only bet on disruptive projects. It is a good example of the quality of science and of the people in Barcelona”.
Judit Anido explains that the company already has a team of 15 people in its Science Park offices, most of them biophysicists and chemical biologists and half of them from other countries. “The first stage for us when creating the company was technology transfer and identification of therapeutic targets that could be attractive. In this second phase we want to validate our platform and demonstrate that it can be used to screen drugs that target other proteins and allow other diseases to be treated.”
Xavier Salvatella, the ICREA and IRB researcher who gave rise to the project, explains that Nuage has developed pioneering technology that makes it possible to develop drugs that target intrinsically disordered proteins, which until now were considered unapproachable and are related to various diseases without cure today, such as various types of cancer.
The need to test different indications justifies the high cost of the round. “It has helped that from the beginning a manager like Asabys entered the capital, which has invested in several successful companies, and that among the managers we have people who have already completed an investment cycle in other biotechs” like myself, says Anido. , who was CEO of Mosaic Biomedicals. “These are factors that help build investor confidence,” she added.