Vancouver’s Abdera Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company that utilizes its advanced antibody engineering platform to design and develop precision radiopharmaceuticals for cancer, has announced that it has raised $142 million in combined Series A and B financing.
The Series A round was led by Versant Ventures and Amplitude Ventures, with participation from Northview Ventures, adMare BioInnovations, and AbCellera, while the Series B round was led by venBio Partners, with participation from existing investors and new investors, including Viking Global Investors, Qiming Venture Partners USA, and RTW Investments.
According to Lori Lyons-Williams, president and chief executive officer of Abdera, “Radiopharmaceuticals hold the potential to transform the treatment of cancer, but the ability to finely tune radioisotope delivery to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue remains a major challenge for this class of drugs.”
She further stated that “Abdera’s ROVEr™ platform enables the design of antibody-based radiopharmaceuticals that are ideally suited to specific cancer targets with optimized PK properties to pair with a radioisotope of choice and maximize therapeutic impact. Our goal is to leverage the power and flexibility of our platform to pursue a variety of oncology targets, advance potential best-in-class new cancer medicines and build Abdera into a leading radiopharmaceutical company.”
Abdera’s Radio Optimized Vector Engineering (ROVEr™) platform allows the company to design novel antibody-based radiopharmaceuticals with high affinity antigen binding domains to cancer targets and an engineered Fc domain that fine-tunes the antibodies’ PK to best suit the delivery of therapeutic isotopes.
Abdera aims to optimize the therapeutic index of potent radioisotopes emitting alpha or beta particles to selectively destroy tumor cells while sparing healthy cells, providing patients with potentially transformative new cancer treatments.
Abdera is led by an exceptional team of scientists and company builders with demonstrated track records in drug development spanning oncology, radiopharmaceuticals, and biologics.
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