After investing more than €23m in Sanifit, the Spanish firm being acquired by Vifor Pharma, Caixa Capital's director of life sciences investments spoke to Scrip about the venture capital firm's long-term approach.

A couple of months after licensing the late-stage kidney disease drug sparsentan from Travere, the Swiss group has beefed up its nephrology activities by buying Mallorca-based Sanifit and Swiss outfit Inositec.

Spain now enjoys a reasonable level of venture capital to help translate its scientific excellence into budding biotechs and the country's major life sciences backer Ysios is looking to unearth more jewels there, as well as in the rest of Europe and North America.

The series A fundraising will help Locana bring CRISPR gene editing to diseases with dysfunctional RNA. Artizan and OncoMyx are among the other firms with recent series A rounds.