Finance Round to Establish Business Strategy

A funding round of €2.5M ($2.7M) is set to advance French biotech Calixa on its strategic pathway of isolating around 100 priory targets for the pharmaceutical industry.

Founded in 2011, the Lyon-based company has been building on its isolation and stabilisation technology together with a research platform, which led to turnover in 2019 of around €1.01M ($1.1M), 90% of which was international. This new funding round will allow Calixar to expand its licensing business model and develop a pipeline of targets of pharmaceutical interest. The company also hopes that the strategic move will affirm its position in the early discovery segment of drug development based on complex therapeutic targets (membrane proteins), a market predicted to be worth €70bn ($76bn) by 2025.

“All the studies agree that the pharmaceutical industry needs to optimise its drug development model,” said Emmanuel Dejean, founder and CEO of Calixar. “In Calixar’s view, the challenges in clinical development relate in particular to the unreliability of the therapeutic targets isolated upstream.”

There are several thousand known therapeutic targets in humans, yet only a handful are currently available to the pharmaceutical industry; the company is working towards increasing the availability of targets that are known to be of primary interest to the pharmaceutical industry.