PEP-Therapy raises €2.75 million in Series A financing to advance its lead candidate, PEP-010, into the clinic

PEP-Therapy raises €2.75 million in Series A financing to advance its lead candidate, PEP-010, into the clinic

Series-A complements non-dilutive grant from

French state innovation fund (FUI)

Paris (France), April 22^nd, 2021 – PEP-Therapy, a biotechnology company developing cell penetrating peptides as targeted therapies for the treatment of cancers, announces it has raised a €2.75 million in a Series A financing round. The financing was led by Italian Angels for Growth (IAG), with participation from Doorway, Magna Capital Partner (MCP) and Business Angels des Grandes Ecoles (BADGE) as well as existing investors Seventure Partners (Quadrivium 1 Seed Fund) and Dr. Bernard Majoie (former Chairman and CEO of Laboratoires Fournier).

The financing round is complemented by a €2.9 million grant from the French state innovation fund - Fonds Unique Interministériel (FUI) – previously received by PEP-Therapy, Institut Curie and Gustave Roussy to develop PEP-010 up to the end of Phase Ia/b clinical trials.

PEP-Therapy will use the funds to progress the clinical development of PEP-010, PEP-Therapy’s lead Cell Penetrating & Interfering Peptide (CP&IP), for the treatment of advanced solid tumors. With this Series A funding, PEP-Therapy expects to generate promising Phase Ia/b clinical data in two indications where patients have a poor prognosis and limited therapeutic alternatives: triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and the platinum resistant ovarian cancer (OC).

Antoine Prestat, CEO and co-founder of PEP-Therapy said: “We are pleased to have raised these new funds from a syndicate of high-quality and international investors, as well as from our historic shareholders, who all share our ambition, commitment, and vision for PEP-Therapy’s development. We are preparing for the first-in-human trials with PEP-010 and look forward to generating the clinical results that we hope will confirm the very promising results seen in preclinical studies.”

Michele Marzola, Life Sciences Lead Investor at IAG, said: “The investment in PEP-Therapy fulfils our objective of supporting innovative companies that will make a difference in the clinic as well as have an impact on society. We have been impressed by the excellent preclinical data that we have seen, and we expect the Company to demonstrate that PEP-010 can address unmet medical needs in difficult to treat ovarian cancer and triple negative breast cancer in the upcoming clinical studies.”

Philippe Tramoy, Partner at Quadrivium 1 Seed Fund – Seventure Partners, said “We look forward to working alongside the company’s new investors to support PEP-Therapy in leveraging its CP&IP platform to generate a pipeline of best-in-class peptides, which promises to improve the treatment of aggressive cancers.”

PEP-010 is the first of a new class of therapeutic peptides based on PEP-Therapy’s innovative CP&IP technology. These innovative molecules penetrate cells and specifically block relevant intracellular protein-protein interactions, leading to the inhibition of key pathological mechanisms, without altering physiological mechanisms.

PEP-Therapy and Institut Curie, France’s leading cancer center, have recently been granted approval from the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) to start first-in-human clinical trial of PEP-010.