Healthcare investment firm MPM Capital has closed its seventh venture fund, BioVentures 2018 (BV2018), raising $400m to fund early-stage biotech innovation.
Image: MPM Capital plans to invest $400m in early-stage biotech firms. Photo: Courtesy of Baitong333/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
MPM Capital invests across three vehicles: BV2018, a venture capital fund; an oncology-only crossover fund (both private and public equities); and another oncology-focused investment initiative with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The company is currently investing out of BV2018 and its two oncology-only funds with a total of more than $1bn in capital.
With the new fund, the company aims to create and invest in new companies that develop breakthrough therapies for treating severe unmet medical needs, focusing on disruptive scientific developments across several therapeutic areas such as oncology, immunology and neuroscience along with emerging modalities of cell, gene and nucleic acid therapies.
MPM co-founder and managing director Ansbert Gadicke said: “We’re grateful for our investors’ support of BV2018, which will allow us to continue to pursue our proven company-building strategy with the goal of improving healthcare outcomes while creating value for our investors. The opportunity to drive innovation in drug development is more attainable than ever before.
“We believe this is particularly true in oncology where MPM has 29 oncology portfolio investments and approximately $1 billion of capital dedicated to developing novel cancer therapies.”
At its core, MPM has a team of fifteen executive partners who work in close collaboration with the investment team to jointly harness scientific creativity, entrepreneurship, and financial and business insights. The executive partners are mostly senior biopharma leaders with decades of experience in drug discovery, clinical development and commercialization.
MPM has involved in all aspects of company building, from identifying and evaluating new opportunities to creating companies and assuming senior management roles across the portfolio.
Some of the companies that were founded and led by MPM executive partners include Harpoon Therapeutics, TCR2 Therapeutics, Mitobridge and Potenza Therapeutics.
Founded in 1997, MPM has raised $3.9bn in capital. Its BioVentures portfolio is claimed to have collected 48 FDA approved drugs and realized more than 100 IPOs and acquisitions. With the new fund BV2018, the company aims to capitalize on favorable industry trends and biomedical discovery.
MPM co-founder and managing director Luke Evnin said: “Over two decades of investing, MPM has developed long-standing and strategic partnerships with academia, biotech and large pharma. Vital to our objective of delivering new treatments to improve the lives of patients, these relationships support our ongoing discovery of next-generation translational science and provide financing and acquisition opportunities across our portfolio.”