Heptares raises $30 million in Series A financing

Clarus Ventures led the syndicate, which includes the founding investor, MVM Life Science Partners, and the Novartis Option Fund. All three investors contributed equally.

Michael Steinmetz for Clarus Ventures and Anja Koenig for the Novartis Option Fund have joined the Heptares board of directors as nonexecutive directors.

Over the next three years, Heptares intends to use the new funds to develop its own pipeline of small-molecule drug candidates using its StaR technology platform. These drug candidates will be developed against currently intractable G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that are highly validated targets for the treatment of disease.

Further progress in the application of StaR technology over this period is also expected to yield commercial partnering opportunities outside Heptares’s core focus, for example, improved therapeutic antibodies against GPCRs, the company said.

Malcolm Weir, CEO of Heptares, said: We are very pleased to have completed this significant fundraising in the current economic environment. We are delighted to have attracted such a truly international group of blue-chip investors and see this as a real endorsement of the quality and commercial potential of our StaR technology. We now have a very good opportunity to implement our strategy for generating new drug candidates to highly validated but previously challenging GPCRs.