Liver disease company Promethera completes €17mm Series B round; raises €6.6mm in debt

Returning shareholder Vesalius Biocapital has led a €17mm ($23mm) Series B financing for Promethera Biosciences SA NV (hepatic progenitor cell therapeutics and predictive models of liver metabolism). Other Series A investors participating in the round included Société Régionale d'Investissement de Wallonie, Vives-Louvain Technology Fund, Life Science Research Partners, NivelInvest, Financière Spin-off Luxembourgeoise, Universite Catholique de Louvain's tech transfer arm Sopartec, and business angels. First-time backers Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Shire, Mitsui Global Investment, ATMI, and SambrInvest also joined. In addition, Promethera received €6.6mm in debt funding from the Walloon Region (one of Belgium’s three federal regions) to fund work on Promethera HepaStem, an alternative to liver transplant. The candidate--an injectable suspension of heterologous human adult liver progenitor cells--has been granted orphan drug status in the US and EU and was recently cleared by British and Belgian regulatory officials to begin a Phase I/II trial in children with Crigler-Najjar syndrome or urea cycle disorders.