China's WuXi NextCode closes $200m Series C

Of the $200 million committed, the ISIF put down $70 million, with the rest coming from other participants include the company’s longtime existing shareholders Temasek, Yunfeng Capital and Sequoia Capital, according to a statement. This round followed the completion of the company's $240 million Series B in September 2017.

The ISIF was the lead shareholder in Genomics Medicine Ireland (GMI), which was recently acquired by WuXi NextCode as its Irish subsidiary and business headquarters in Europe. Proceeds from the round will be used to rapidly expand GMI's operations and to accelerate the company’s program of enrolling and sequencing the entire genome of some 400,000 people from across Ireland.

"This phase of our growth has a distinctly Irish focus to it, and we are creating in Ireland the world's premier genome dataset as a uniquely powerful engine both for transforming how we discover new drugs, as well as for bringing new diagnostics, risk screens and other tools and services to the individual patients,” said Rob Brainin, CEO of WuXi NextCode.

With offices in China, the UK, the US, Iceland and Ireland, the company was originated from one of the earliest large-scale global genomics initiatives, DeCode Genetics, in Iceland in 1996.

It created a population-based biobank containing blood and DNA samples from around 120,000 people. These samples formed the basis of studies on how certain genes function and their relationship to a broad array of diseases, and this information was used by pharmaceutical companies to develop precision medicines.

DeCode struggled financially and it was bought by Amgen in 2012. The following year, Amgen spun off DeCode’s genome dataset – which by that point held data on 400,000 people – and IT systems to form NextCode Health. WuXi PharmaTech bought NextCode in 2015 in a deal worth $65 million. Currently, Wuxi NextCode is listed as one of the parent’s three major entities, with the other two being WuXi Biologics, which raised $510 million in its 2017 Hong Kong IPO, and WuXi AppTec, which went public in Shanghai in May, raising $328 million.

There are two strands to WuXi NextCode’s business: it licenses intellectual property rights to global drug developers (B2B), and it provides testing services to individual Chinese patients, using next-generation genomics to screen unborn children during pregnancy and to provide personalized wellness profiles that can help identify generic risks early on (B2C). These B2C services are provided through partnerships with hospitals.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Healthcare
• Expansion
• China
• healthcare
• Yunfeng Capital
• Sequoia Capital
• Temasek Holdings