Radiant Biotherapeutics, a preclinical biotechnology company building an antibody platform to deliver transformative therapies for patients facing life-changing disease, announced it has closed a $35 million Series A financing. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Amplitude Ventures of Canada co-led the funding round. The additional participants in the Series A include new investors BDC Capital, the VC arm of the Business Development Bank of Canada, through its Thrive Venture Fund, and abrdn, an investment fund managed by abrdn Inc.; and existing investors FACIT, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (TIAP).
Radiant has created a best-in-class, proprietary, multi-valent, multi-specific antibody platform called Multabody. And the funding will enable Radiant to further develop the company’s lead clinical candidate 4-1BB and move it towards clinical trials.
Multabody therapeutics are able to overcome the shortcomings of existing antibody approaches by leveraging remarkable avidity (or binding strength) on their intended targets. And multabodies also exploit multi-specificity, enabling targeting of different disease-modifying proteins and multiple epitopes on the same target. Together, these qualities give Multabody therapeutics exceptional potency against both solid tumors and blood cancers, infectious disease pathogens, and other targets in multiple therapeutic areas.
Radiant Biotherapeutics was launched in 2020 and is built around foundational science developed at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto and the University of Toronto, based on and including work performed at the laboratories of Jean-Philippe Julien, Ph.D., senior scientist at SickKids and associate professor at University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and Bebhinn Treanor, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Toronto. The company emerged from stealth mode in 2023 following a seed investment led by Amplitude Ventures, FACIT, TIAP and Alexandria Venture Investments. Radiant maintains offices in Toronto and Philadelphia.
KEY QUOTES:
“These supportive investors share our vision of delivering powerful, multi-functional biologics with the potential to advance treatments for patients suffering from debilitating and life-threatening illnesses. This investment enables us to further demonstrate the unique power and breadth of our platform across multiple therapeutic areas with a focus in oncology, inflammation and immunology, and global health and infectious disease, including HIV.”
-Arthur J. Fratamico, President and CEO of Radiant
“This financing will enable the next stage in Radiant’s growth and move the company towards the clinic as it continues to demonstrate the superiority of the Multabody™ platform against therapeutic targets that cannot be treated with traditional antibodies. We are investing to accelerate Radiant’s transition to clinical stage and to expand its pipeline in additional therapeutic areas.”
-Bharat Srinivasa, Ph.D., principal at Amplitude Ventures
