China's Alphamab gets $100m Series A
China’s Alphamab Oncology has completed a $100 million Series A funding round from a group of investors including PAG Growth Capital, Advantech Capital, and OrbiMed.
Other participants included Heritage Provider Network, Janchor Partners, and China Venture Capital Fund, a RMB200 billion ($29 billion) vehicle set up by the government in 2016. The capital will be used to progress a pipeline of immune-oncology products, hire talent, and complete the ongoing construction of a biologics manufacturing facility.
Founded in 2009, Alphamab operates across more than 60,000 square feet of R&D facilities in Suzhou with a team of some 100 scientists and leveraging partnerships with a number of organizations, including the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and Chinese Academy of Science. Product development platforms cover areas such as bispecifics, protein engineering, and antibody screening.
The company has several products in different stages of research in China, the US, Japan and Australia. Dong Lyu, an executive director of PAG, said that the most advanced of these was expected to obtain market approval within a “relatively short period of time with a distinct clinical advantage.” The product, which focuses on quality of life for long-term cancer sufferers, entered late-stage trialing last month.
"China’s innovative drug industry is embracing superior development opportunities, within which the innovative oncology biologics sector has become a focus with tremendous market potential,” Shaojing Ma, a managing director at China Venture Capital Fund, said in a statement. “With world-class R&D capability, Alphamab Oncology has the potential to become a leader of China biopharmaceutical industry.”
Investment interest in China’s biotech space has escalated rapidly in recent years on the back of policy liberalizations and rising demand for advanced treatments related to widescale lifestyle changes. According to AVCJ Research, Chinese PE and VC investment in drug development increased from $306 million in 2014 to $1.3 billion last year. This figure surpassed $2.1 billion in the first half of 2018.
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