After launching last year and swiftly grabbing a Takeda deal, European Treg biotech Egle Therapeutics has bulked up its coffers with a 40 million euro ($46.4 million) funding round.
The Paris-based company came into life last year as a spinout of Institut Curie by Luc Boblet, a serial biotech entrepreneur, and Eliane Piaggio, Ph.D., a well-known immunologist in the Treg and IL-2 fields.
It’s developing what it says are first-in-class immunotherapies targeting immune suppressor regulatory T cells (aka Tregs) for both cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The series A was co-led by LSP and Bpifrance through their InnoBio 2 fund. Fund+, Bioqube Ventures and Takeda Ventures also participated in this round. The new financing will be put to use “primarily to advance two lead assets into the clinic and further strengthen its internal drug pipeline,” Egle said in a statement.
It’s been a good 18 months for the startup since Takeda pledged to invest 4.6 million euros in convertible debt through its venture arm last summer while also tapping Egle to help uncover new tumor-specific Treg targets and to work on antisuppressor-based immunotherapies.
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It joins other biotechs working in the Treg field, including Gilead via its deal with Kyverna, combining Kyverna’s synthetic Treg platform with the synthetic gene expression system synNotch from Gilead.
“Closing a substantial series A of €40 million from a high-quality syndicate of renowned investors as well as a partnership with a top big pharma like the one we have announced with Takeda in June 2020, all in less than 18 months, puts Egle on a trajectory to execute its vision of tackling regulatory T cells to restore immunity in patients suffering from cancer and autoimmune diseases” said Boblet, co-founder and CEO of Egle.
“The funding will give us appropriate resources to push the first Treg starvers into the clinic and we feel very privileged to undertake such responsibility for the benefit of the whole patient community”.