The UK-headquartered life sciences investment firm has comfortably exceeded its target of $350m for a fund dedicated to taking on late-stage products, incurring all the clinical and regulatory risk and receiving a pre-negotiated return once the drug is approved.

The ABV 8 fund will invest $15m to $30m per company across the range from start-ups to development-stage companies.

Novartis has added an anti-osteoarthritic Nanobody, M6495, to its growing pipeline of candidates for the condition, in a €450m agreement with Merck KGaA that sees the latter deliver on its plans to find new homes for its osteoarthritis pipeline.

Private Company Edition: XtalPi raised $318.8m for its AI-based drug discovery platform and machine learning-enabled Flagship start-up Valo Health has brought in nearly $100m. XtalPi had one of three recent venture capital mega-rounds for China-based companies.