Lilly Asia commits $15m to China cancer drug developer
Lilly Asia Venture has provided a Series A round of funding worth $15 million for MabSpace Bioscience, a China-based company focused on developing cancer therapies.
Founded in 2012, MabSpace specializes in the discovery and early development of antibody therapeutics for cancer treatment. It has built a fully-integrated R&D facility in Suzhou Industrial Park.
The company intends to use the new capital to advance its pipeline of therapeutic antibody programs into human clinical proof, as well as to discover other types of anti-cancer agents.
"We believe that MabSpace has built a differentiated approach rooted in its unique immune tolerance breaking based antibody discovery platform and traditional science capabilities that position it to bring the next wave of innovation to the field," says Stephen Lin, a principal at Lily Asia, said in a statement.
China-focused Lilly Asia spun out from global pharmaceuticals firm Eli Lilly in 2011. The existing portfolio companies invested through the corporate VC arm between 2008-2010 was packaged into Fund I, and then Eli Lilly was the sole LP in the $100 million second vehicle.
The life-sciences VC firm closed its third fund at $300 million in April, with Eli Lilly once again participating at anchor LP alongside a mixture of sovereign wealth funds, fund-of-funds and family offices.
The fund will invest $5-25 million a time in 20 growth-stage companies, with 75% of the corpus earmarked for drug development and the rest going into medical devices and diagnostics with a clinical angle.
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