InflaRx closes funding to move its complement antibody program into clinical trials for sepsis treatment

Jena- Ger­many, March 18^th 2009, InflaRx GmbH announced today the clos­ing of its fund­ing, lead by Affen­tranger Asso­ciates along­side with bm‑t (beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen gmbh). InflaRx GmbH was founded by its CEO, Prof. Niels Riede­mann and its CSO, Prof. Ren­feng Guo, with pro­grams aim­ing pri­mar­ily at devel­op­ing new ther­a­peu­tic anti­bod­ies for the sep­sis indi­ca­tion focus­ing on the com­ple­ment sys­tem. Since incep­tion, InflaRx has suc­cess­fully com­pleted three mile­stones-dri­ven tranches of financ­ing within its series A.

“Com­plet­ing this large financ­ing tranche in the mid­dle of the cur­rent finan­cial envi­ron­ment is a major achieve­ment for our team. It reflects the strong com­mit­ment of our investors and the good devel­op­ment progress within the first year” says Prof. Riede­mann, “We are now well financed to move our first project into clin­i­cal tri­als in the near future”.

InflaRx suc­cess­fully devel­oped its pro­to­type mon­o­clonal anti­bod­ies in part­ner­ship with Bei­jing Mab­works Biotech China. “This has been a tremen­dously well-work­ing alliance of our pro­pri­etary know-how and the state-of-the-art per­for­mance of our Chi­nese part­ners,” says InflaRx CSO Prof. Guo who has led the pro­gram on site.

“InflaRx has proven to be able to com­bine a cost-effec­tive strat­egy with excel­lent devel­op­ment results. This allowed the com­pany to receive the full sup­port of its exist­ing investors and to attract new investors despite the dif­fi­cult mar­ket con­di­tions,” says Nico­las Fulpius, board chair­man of InflaRx and Part­ner at Affen­tranger Asso­ciates. “We are glad to see this suc­cess­ful devel­op­ment of InflaRx. With its devel­op­ment of new ther­a­peu­tics for the sep­sis indi­ca­tion, InflaRx deliv­ers a strong added-value to the fast grow­ing sep­sis hub in Jena,” adds Dr. Guido Bohnenkamp, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of bm‑t.

As of today, sep­sis – also called blood poi­son­ing in the pub­lic press – is the most fre­quent cause of death in non-car­di­o­log­i­cal inten­sive care units world­wide. With over 1.5 mil­lion cases in Europe and North Amer­ica alone, and with mor­tal­ity rates up to 50%, sep­sis remains one of the largest and least pub­licly rec­og­nized unmet med­ical needs.

Based in Jena, InflaRx is seated in a world­wide rec­og­nized sep­sis research hub and col­lab­o­rates with the Clinic of Anes­the­si­ol­ogy and Inten­sive Care Ther­apy at the Friedrich-Schiller-Uni­ver­sity, the mul­ti­cen­ter sep­sis net­work SEPNET and the newly BMBF-funded Cen­ter for Inno­va­tion Com­pe­tence Sep­tomics. The Sci­en­tific Advi­sory Board of InflaRx is com­posed by two world lead­ers in the field of basic and clin­i­cal sep­sis research with Prof. Peter Ward and Prof. Kon­rad Rein­hart.

Fur­ther Infor­ma­tion: www.inflaRx.com

Incor­po­rated in 2002, Affen­tranger Asso­ciates is a Switzer­land based busi­ness plat­form focused on the theme of value cre­ation and active man­age­ment. As prin­ci­pal investor, the com­pany has the ambi­tion to achieve sus­tain­able long-term returns by invest­ing with a com­bi­na­tion of man­age­ment and cap­i­tal in high-growth poten­tial com­pa­nies. Affen­tranger Asso­ciates has offices in Geneva and Zurich.

Fur­ther Infor­ma­tion: www.aasa.com