Immune-Onc Closes $73 Million Series B1 and B2 Financing

(VCBeat) Mar. 30, 2021 -- Immune-Onc Therapeutics, Inc. ("Immune-Onc"), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the R&D of pioneering biotherapeutics targeting immunosuppressive myeloid checkpoints for cancer patients worldwide. The company recently closed a Series B1/B2 funding round of approximately $73 million. The latest round was led by Oceanpine Capital, with participation from well-known domestic funds such as Yinglian Health Fund, South China Venture Capital, Qianzhan Investment, Triwise Capital, Sherpa Venture Capital, Yanchuang Capital, BOCOM International, and Tao Capital, as well as foreign funds including Octagon Capital, and Sphera Healthcare. Strategic investors such as Wuxi Biologics and existing investors Northern Light Venture Capital and Vivo Capital also invested in this financing. To date, Immune-Onc has raised more than $110 million in total funding.

The funds raised in this round will be used to advance and expand the company's pipeline of pioneering drugs worldwide and its operations in the United States and China. CEC Capital acted as Immune-Onc's exclusive financial adviser for this round of financing.

In addition, Immune-Onc received a strategic capital investment from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Therapy Acceleration Program^® (LLS TAP), directed toward advancing the company's work to treat blood cancers. In August 2020, the company announced it had been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the clinical development of IO-202.

Immune-Onc is a clinical-stage company moving beyond T-cell targeted immunotherapies for cancer. Equipped with unique expertise in myeloid cell biology and insights into immune suppressive dynamics that allow cancer cells to grow and spread in the body, Immune-Onc is developing a novel class of myeloid checkpoint inhibitors. The company's current pipeline targets the LILRB family of immune inhibitory receptors to reverse immune suppression and tumor infiltration.

As one of the first biopharmaceutical companies in the world to develop innovative drugs targeting leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor subfamily B (LILRB), Immune-Onc has established a series of proprietary experimental models, methods and tools, and has built a systematic platform for target validation, candidate screening and optimization, and clinical development. Thus, Immune-Onc has laid a solid foundation for the follow-up development of its pipeline and the expansion of indications.

Oceanpine Healthcare Fund is a healthcare venture fund that aims to connect innovation in the US to the Chinese consumer base, and primarily invests in Chinese and US firms with core technologies and proprietary R&D capabilities. They bridge a supply and demand gap exacerbated by limited R&D in China. 

Yinglian Health Fund's investors are from the industry's head pharmaceutical enterprises. The fund is research-oriented, deeply explores investment opportunities of innovative drugs, medical technologies and devices on a global scale. The company jointly incubates companies with top scientists, PI and clinical transformation teams to solve the problem of innovation fundamentally from 0 to 1.