Danish biotech company Draupnir Bio raises €12M to tackle disease-causing proteins

Copenhagen-based Draupnir Bio, a biotechnology company, announced recently that it has secured €12M from MP Healthcare, the corporate venture group of Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), a financing fund backed by the Danish government.

The Danish company announces it will use the funds to develop its diverse preclinical pipeline of oral, small molecule protein degraders.

These have been proven effective against both validated targets and traditionally difficult-to-drug targets.

Andrew Hotchkiss, Chief Executive Officer of Draupnir Bio, says, “Draupnir has a bold ambition to pioneer the next frontier of extracellular protein degradation. Our novel technology platform targeting extracellular and membrane-bound disease proteins for degradation holds great promise for targets that have previously been difficult to target with small molecules or have been undruggable and enables the development of new therapeutic approaches for complex conditions.” 

“We are delighted to welcome MP Healthcare and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark as investors in the Company and thank our existing investors, Gilde Healthcare Partners, Inkef Capital, and Novo Holdings, for their continued support,” ads Hotchkiss. 

Draupnir Bio: Bringing innovative therapies to patients

Founded as a spin-off of Aarhus University, Denmark, and the Max-Planck Society, Draupnir Bio is a Danish biotech company using the lysosome’s natural machinery to develop oral, small molecule degraders of disease-causing proteins.

According to the company, this approach represents the next frontier of targeted protein degradation (TPD), a field that harnesses a cell’s machinery to tackle historically challenging proteins with conventional therapies.

However, the first-generation approaches are exclusively limited to cytosolic targets, leaving extracellular and membrane-bound proteins – 40 per cent of the human proteome – untouched.

The Danish company is expanding the use of TPD to target extracellular and membrane-bound proteins. They are using a novel and unique technology platform that utilizes lysosome receptors. This approach has the potential to revolutionise the field of TPD.