The Catalan biotechnology company Ability Pharma has closed a seven-million-euro investment round, led by the Canadian venture capital fund CTI Life Science Fund, together with the Barcelona firm Inveready and the EIC Fund of the European Commission. Also participating in the operation were Ivamosa and Gesamo, the family offices of the Roca family, owner of the R0ca sanitary porcelain group, who have backed the biotech founded in 2009 and based in the Parc Tecnològic del Vallès.
The round also included resources contributed by CDTI Innvierte and by the venture capital fund FiTalent. The founders of Ability Pharma have also supported the operation, which has been completed with a collective investment campaign on the Capital Cell platform. The seven million will be used to fully finance the international phase 2b clinical trial of its promising drug against metastatic pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest types of cancer that exist.
"This investment will allow us to continue working tirelessly to bring ABTL0812 to pancreatic cancer patients," guaranteed the executive president and co-founder of AbilityPharma, Carles Domènech. The company, which develops innovative oral drugs for cancer treatment, uses the processes by which cells break down their damaged proteins —autophagy— as a new therapeutic strategy to induce selective death of cancer cells.
The company is working with the intention of making the drug available to pancreatic cancer patients in 2028Through the clinical trial that the company will finance with the funds raised in the round, it will evaluate the efficacy of the drug ABTL0812 for patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer. The biotech company expects to have trial results by the end of 2024, that is being developed in 23 hospitals in Spain, the United States, France, and Israel. A total of 140 patients who have already been recruited will participate in the study, which will be conducted placebo-controlled and in combination with chemotherapy.
AblityPharma's goal is to demonstrate that its drug is more effective than current chemotherapy treatment for a disease with a very low survival rate. These results would allow the Catalan company to obtain financing for the final development of the drug, or to license the molecule to another company to complete it and make it available to pancreatic cancer patients in 2028.
Thus, this round will contribute to boosting an "innovative and highly promising treatment for pancreatic cancer," according to CTI Life Sciences Fund managing partner, Shermaine Tilley, who joins AbilityPharma's board of directors. From Inveready, its general partner, Sara Secall, highlighted the importance of "attracting smart investors who can help advance AbilityPharma's treatment for cancer patients." The president of the EIC Fund Board, Svetoslava Georgieva, expressed a similar sentiment, stating that the fund has become "a powerful player in high-tech investments in the EU."
These funds are in addition to the two million non-dilutive euros granted to the company in 2023 by the Ministry of Science and Innovation with contributions from Next Generation. They are also added to those raised by the biotech company in 2020, when it closed a three-million-dollar investment agreement with the Chinese company SciClone Pharmaceuticals, which joined its shareholding as an industrial partner.
It was also in 2020 when the company obtained the necessary funding and authorizations to begin its international clinical trial from the US drug agency, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Already then called to mark a turning point in the fight against pancreatic cancer, the hopeful trial began in May 2021 with patients from Barcelona and the United States.
Pancreatic cancer is considered an orphan disease, as there are no specific effective and safe therapies beyond chemotherapy. It is a tumor that mainly affects people between 65 and 70 years old, difficult to diagnose and with high mortality. Currently, it is the third leading cause of cancer death in Europe, where an estimated 130,000 people die each year, and it is the seventh worldwide.
Furthermore, the drug ABTL0812 has proven effective in a phase 2 clinical study in patients with endometrial cancer and non-small cell squamous lung cancer, and has received orphan drug designation for pancreatic cancer, biliary cancer, and pediatric neuroblastoma cancer by the FDA and the European Medicines Agency.