Our Investment Focus & Portfolio

The company pioneers a novel modality in drug development to develop a complete new class of antibiotics and first in class therapeutics against high value typical undruggable human targets. The technology, branded Pept-insTM, harnesses the power of protein aggregation to specifically induce a functional knockdown of a target protein. Aelin Therapeutics was founded by VIB and its partner universities KU Leuven, VUB, UGent, based on the ground-breaking work of renowned structural biologists Prof Joost Schymkowitz and Prof Frederic Rousseau. Aelin Therapeutics raised €27 million in a Series A financing round in December 2017 with a strong investor syndicate including LSP (the Netherlands), PMV (Belgium), Novartis Venture Fund (Switzerland), Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (Germany) and Fund+ (Belgium).

ArrePath is a Princeton (NJ)-based company that is developing a machine learning-powered discovery platform of novel mechanism of action anti-microbial resistant drugs. The platform utilizes bacterial autopsy image recognition-based machine learning to prioritize hits with novel MoA from high-throughput phenotypic screening to significantly accelerate the identification of hits, and thus allow the rapid discovery of novel MoA proprietary antibiotics.

Centauri Therapeutics is an immunotherapy company focused on the treatment of infectious diseases dedicated to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research, using their Alphamer^® platform to identify and progress novel antibacterial candidates through first-in-human trials, for difficult-to-treat infections. The Alphamer technology introduces an innovative drug mechanism that recruits and directs pre-existing antibodies specifically to pathogens, engaging both innate and adaptive immunity to elicit an immune response that clears the infection.

Delonix Bioworks is a biotech company leveraging synthetic biology approaches and gene editing to develop the next generation medical solutions to infectious diseases and cancer. The company’s research programs focus on rational design and programming of bacteria as living medicines.

Eyevensys S.A.S. is a developer of a new non-viral gene therapy process to treat ocular illnesses. The new process enables prolonged production of therapeutic proteins through injection and electrotransfer of expression plasmids into the ciliar muscle and is aimed at treating uveitis and AMD. In stage two, Eyevensys will focus on treating more common conditions such as diabetic retinopathy.The company was founded in Paris (France) in 2009 by Francine Behar-Cohen, professor of medicine at Paris Descartes University, head of ophthalmology at l'Hotel Dieu.

RiboX Therapeutics is a Shanghai based Biotech Company focused on discovery and development of fully engineered circular RNA therapeutics - a new class of RNA medicines which can overcome current limitations of mRNA therapeutics and realize the full potential of RNA medicines. The company was founded by world-leading scientists from RNA biology and nanomedicine field. The management team are industrial veterans from Roche, Merck, Bayer with extensive experience in early discovery, drug delivery and translational medicine.

smartbax develops novel multi-targeted, antibacterial compounds with extraordinary potency against multi-drug resistant bacteria and difficult-to-treat biofilms. With the first-in-class compounds, the company targets the multi-drug resistant pathogens methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). The new class of antibiotic compounds is based on the research by Prof. Stephan Sieber and his team at Technical University Munich. smartbax GmbH was incorporated in 2021 and is based in Munich. Due to the increasing prevalence of resistance against marketed antibiotics, smartbax addresses a need which is growing dramatically.

Topas Therapeutics is a private Hamburg-based biotechnology company focused on developing peptide-loaded nanoparticles to address immuno-tolerization of major unmet clinical need, including autoimmune diseases, allergies and anti-drug antibodies. Topas’ technology platform induces antigen-specific immune tolerance by harnessing the liver’s natural immuno-tolerizing capabilities.