Utrecht, Netherlands-based Sapreme Technologies, a biotechnology company that works to improve the delivery and efficacy of macromolecule therapeutics to treat cancer, announced that it has secured €15M in its Series A round of funding.
The funding comes after the company’s 2020 and 2021 preclinical data demonstrated the effectiveness of its endosomal escape compound – SPT001.
Investors & capital utilisation
The Series A round was led by founding investor Aglaia Oncology Funds, together with Aglaia-associated partners.
Guy Hermans, Ph.D., CEO of Sapreme, says, “The continued support of Aglaia and its backers is invaluable to us as we continue to showcase the potential of our platform and establish our proprietary therapeutics pipeline. These proceeds will allow us to mature our platform and to generate preclinical data needed to showcase the full scope of our technology.”
The funds will enable Sapreme to accelerate the buildout of its endosomal escape technology platform and support the further progress of its proprietary pipeline and corporate development activities.
Speaking on the utilisation of funding, Henrik Luessen, Chief Business Officer of Sapreme says, “Having engaged in multiple studies with industry players throughout the past year, we see the opportunity to expand these collaborations to a range of new indications and drug modalities in the months ahead. We now look forward to further scale the platform and advancing our internal drug development pipeline, which following the Series A round, we are well-positioned to do.
Developer of therapies to treat cancer
Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Guy Hermans, Sapreme was founded to develop improved macromolecular therapeutics such as antibody-targeted antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) for the treatment of cancer and other indications. The company develops next-gen macromolecule therapeutics by circumventing endosomal entrapment, thereby enhancing target engagement.
Sapreme’s proprietary endosomal escape platform is designed to allow therapeutics to reach their target without becoming entrapped by the endosome. Endosomal entrapment poses a significant hurdle for the drug discovery and development industry, currently limiting the development of a broad range of potential macromolecular therapeutics to ‘undruggable’ intracellular targets.
This approach is applied for Sapreme’s internal pipeline and is available for partnering without limitation to biologic modality or indication.
In addition to earlier data, supporting the use of its platform in oncology and in combination with various drug modalities, the company recently unveiled new in vivo data, demonstrating its ability to enhance the delivery of oligonucleotides to the liver using GalNAc targeting – currently a mainstay in the therapeutic oligo development field. The data revealed consistent high levels of gene expression knockdown in the liver at reduced oligonucleotide doses.
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