News & Insights
This is where we share our own and our portfolio companies’ press releases as well as relevant Sunstone articles, analyses and SoMe posts.
5 latest news
5 latest insights
News Archive
MinervaX appoints Lidia Oostvogels as Chief Medical Officer and provides clinical and regulatory update on its novel GBS vaccine
MinervaX ApS, a privately held Danish biotechnology company developing a novel vaccine against Group B Streptococcus (GBS), today announces the appointment of Lidia Oostvogels as Chief Medical Officer and provides an update on its novel GBS vaccine. Lidia Oostvogels...
Alligator Bioscience Announces Positive Interim Results from Mitazalimab OPTIMIZE-1 Phase 2 Trial in Pancreatic Cancer Exceeding 50% Objective Response Rate
Alligator Bioscience (Nasdaq Stockholm: ATORX) today announces strong interim results from the ongoing OPTIMIZE-1 Phase 2 trial of the company’s lead asset mitazalimab in 1st line metastatic pancreatic cancer. This open-label, multi-center study is assessing the...
Alligator Bioscience and Orion Corporation announce the initiation of the second program of their Immuno-oncology Research Collaboration and License Agreement
Alligator Bioscience (Nasdaq Stockholm: ATORX) today announces an expansion to its research collaboration and license agreement with Orion Corporation, a global pharmaceutical company based in Finland, to discover and develop together new bispecific antibody cancer...
MinervaX announces 72M EUR financing to advance development of novel vaccine against Group B Streptococcus
MinervaX ApS, a privately held Danish biotechnology company developing a novel vaccine against Group B Streptococcus (GBS), today announces the successful completion of a 72 million EUR financing round. The equity financing of 22 million EUR was co-led by new...
New Strong Orviglance Data Support Successful SPARKLE Completion with Substantially Fewer Patients
Ascelia Pharma AB (publ) (ticker: ACE), a biotech focused on improving the life of people living with rare cancer conditions, today announced that new data show that the pivotal Phase 3 clinical SPARKLE study with the lead candidate drug Orviglance can be completed...
Ascelia Pharma Announces Successful Final Results from Orviglance Hepatic Impairment Study
Ascelia Pharma AB (publ) (ticker: ACE), a biotech focused on improving the life of people living with rare cancer conditions, today announced the final results of the Hepatic Impairment Study confirming that the company’s lead drug candidate, the magnetic resonance...
MinervaX announces that EMA has awarded PRIME Status for its Group B Streptococcal vaccine
MinervaX, a privately held Danish biotechnology company,today announces that EMA has awarded PRIME status for its vaccine against Group B Streptococcus (GBS).PRIME is aimed at enhancing support for the development of medicines that target an unmet medical need. This...
Galecto Completes Enrollment in Phase 1b_2a GULLIVER-2 Trial of its Selective, Oral Galectin-3 Inhibitor GB1211 in Liver Cirrhosis
BOSTON, March 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Galecto, Inc. (NASDAQ: GLTO), a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of novel treatments for fibrosis and cancer, today announced it has completed enrollment in Parts 2 and 3 of its ongoing 3-part...
NEC OncoImmunity Acquires VAXIMM’s Neoantigen Vaccine Development Assets
NEC OncoImmunity (NOI), a subsidiary of NEC Corporation (NEC), and VAXIMM AG, a Swiss/German biotech company focused on developing an oral plug and play DNA vaccination technology to stimulate patients’ cytotoxic T-cells targeting a wide range of cancer-related...
Insights Archive
Biotech startups in Scandinavia have 460 MEUR at hand – but burn is up – and runway the shortest in 3 years
As the market continues to fluctuate and geopolitical issues continue to impact the economy, it's important to take a closer look at the state of pre-commercial life science companies. At Sunstone, we assisted companies in our portfolio with listings and refinancing,...
Unmet medical needs in cardiovascular sub-populations – an opportunity for VCs?
Unmet medical needs in cardiovascular sub-populations – an opportunity for VCs? For the past 5 months we have had the pleasure of having Philip Brainin as intern at Sunstone Life Science Ventures. Apart from bringing valuable insights to our daily activities, he has...
Why do VC’s not cut losses in time?
Why do VC’s not cut losses in time? A clinical trial is a very expensive experiment for testing a hypothesis, while hoping for a positive outcome. However, if well designed, a negative outcome could increase the potential for a positive outcome in a subsequent trial....
Are some diseases associated with a higher risk of venture capital losses?
Are some diseases associated with a higher risk of venture capital losses? Before summer we posted a study correlating venture capital losses in drug development with the magnitude of funding of clinical trials. We have used two approaches to find losses: 1)...
Do compromises in clinical trials cause Venture Capital losses?
Do compromises in clinical trials cause Venture Capital losses? In 2020 and 2021 Sunstone looked in depth at drug development venture-backed successes to find usable attributes and learn from the past. We have now turned the analysis up-side down and looked at the...
Who is in the driver’s seat of our industry?
A recent analysis from Pharma Intelligence | Informa 2021 highlights the current trends of pipeline products (top panel). We have subsequently surveyed Sunstone’s incoming deal flow for the same period and noted the correlation for the top 3 categories with oncology...
US IPO: Value recognition? Not really! Trading liquidity? Yes!
We previously looked at M&A of VC funded private and listed companies in the EU and US (https://bit.ly/3EU4n8H). Listing EU companies in the US is perceived as more attractive or beneficial – but is it reflected in the numbers? Recently, we decided to take a...
Why would you do a US IPO?
We recently compared EUR >50M M&A’s of VC funded EU and US drug developing companies and concluded that a substantial difference exists between the EU and US (https://bit.ly/3uftQmU). Previously we have also looked at EU M&A’s before or after an IPO....
M&A multiples in the US – should you go west?
Sunstone has previously investigated the return multiples of venture capital funded companies HQ’ed in Europe (https://bit.ly/3n0bd3B) and concluded that when the total invested amount exceeds EUR 50M, the return multiple tends to stay below 5 in M&A transactions....
Best country for sourcing new deals?
Do you also in your mind have a priority list of destinations to visit once the world normalises and you can get back on a plane? If so, and if you are a Venture Capitalist, you may also be wondering which countries have been creating most Life Science M&A...
Why are we investing in Drug Development and hesitating with regards to Medical Devices or Diagnostics?
Part of the answer is obviously that our past experiences and successes fall within Drug Development – but also that both MedTech and Diagnostics seem to have a lower likelihood of getting to an exit once you have invested. Defining the field for Medical Devices and...
Increasing the investor return multiple with an IPO?
For private company M&A the multiple stayed below 5x after a company had raised more than EUR 45M (https://bit.ly/36dPAVy). We have now added 12 European M&As completed after an IPO. The figure below shows the “Grand return multiple”, i.e. our calculation of...
To IPO… or not to IPO
We have recently added 12 venture funded companies to our M&A analysis of European therapeutic companies acquired post-IPO. As expected, those companies were acquired at a later developed stage. As previously highlighted most European venture capital funded...
Modest interest in Human Safety!?
We have previously highlighted that most European venture capital funded therapeutic companies are acquired after receiving less than EUR 45M in venture capital funding. It also appears that companies are acquired either before EUR 10M have been invested or after an...
The best VC’s for developing Therapeutics in Europe?
The VC’s investing in Europe can be ranked by the number of times they have participated in a EUR >50M M&A of a company developing therapeutics. In Sunstone’s analysis of the 56 M&As that took place in the period 2010-2020, 243 named investors participated....
Beating the odds
What do you think? Let us know in our feed on LinkedIn: Using Pitchbook® we have identified 56, EUR >50M, M&A transactions of VC funded companies developing therapeutics from 2010 to 2020 and have modelled the investor cash flow in each of the companies....
Are antibody-based therapeutics and venture capital a bad mix?
Sunstone monitors and analyzes all M&A transactions for therapeutic companies HQ’ed in Europe, with an exit transaction value exceeding EUR 50M. Upon fragmenting the 43 transactions executed between 2010 and 2020 by modalities, we were surprised to observe that...
Are big financing rounds and venture star multiples a realistic expected outcome?
Like many of our colleagues, our initial investment hypothesis is always to achieve a 5-10x return when we invest. When achieved, these are often referred to as the stars, performers or unicorns of a venture capital portfolio. Sunstone continuously monitors and...
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