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Drug Development

Verdiva smashes European biotech financing record

London-based firm will develop weight-loss molecules licensed from a Chinese company

by Asher Mullard, special to C&EN
January 14, 2025

 

A collage depicting a pill superimposed over injectable drug vials.
Credit: C&EN illustration/Shutterstock

London-based Verdiva Bio has launched with $411 million in series A funding, becoming the latest biotechnology firm to seek weight-loss drug opportunities. The start-up expects to advance its lead asset—a once-weekly oral glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist—into Phase 2 trials for weight loss and the treatment of obesity later this year.

The series A fundraising is the biggest ever for a European biotech firm, according to the data provider PitchBook. Immunocore, also based in London, previously held the top spot, securing $320 million in a first financing in 2015 to develop immunotherapies.

“We believe that the healthcare sector is only just beginning to unravel the impact of weight loss and the space is really underserved,” Khurem Farooq, Verdiva’s CEO, says in an email. “The once-weekly, oral assets we have in our portfolio have the potential to not only improve patient convenience, but also deliver equivalent or better efficacy at considerably lower doses than competitor products.”

Verdiva is one of many drug developers racing to replicate the commercial success of Novo Nordisk’s injectable GLP-1 receptor agonist Wegovy (semaglutide). The weight-loss drug is on track to log over $13 billion in global sales in 2025, according to Evaluate, a pharmaceutical intelligence firm. Ozempic, Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide-based diabetes treatment, is expected to reap over $22 billion in sales. Eli Lilly and Company’s competing weight-loss drug, Zepbound (tirzepatide), could post over $11 billion in sales; Mounjaro, a Lilly diabetes treatment also based on tirzepatide, is expected to garner nearly $20 billion in sales.

Other newcomers to the weight-loss drug field include Kailera Therapeutics, which launched in October with $400 million in funding, and Metsera, which debuted in April with $290 million and has since filed for an initial public offering of stock.

Verdiva is championing VRB-101, a peptide that targets the GLP-1 receptor to suppress appetite. The company licensed the molecule ­and a portfolio of related peptides from the Chinese firm Sciwind Biosciences, marking a continued interest in discovered-in-China drugs. VRB-101, previously dubbed ecnoglutide (XW004), was designed to be easier to manufacture and potentially more effective than semaglutide, and it can be taken orally.

“It is still early days for the oral GLP-1s, but we have seen some really encouraging data to date—both for our own programs and more broadly in the space,” Farooq writes.

Novo Nordisk also has a once-daily oral version of semaglutide in Phase 3 development for obesity and a once-weekly version in Phase 1 for diabetes.

Farooq previously ran Aiolos Bio, which launched in 2023 with $245 million and an anti-inflammatory antibody it had licensed from a Chinese company. GSK acquired Aiolos months later for $1 billion up front and up to $400 million in milestones. Before that, he ran Gyroscope Therapeutics, a gene therapy company that launched in 2016 and that Novartis acquired in 2022.

Farooq says his team worked for over a year to evaluate drug candidates from more than 100 companies across the US, Europe, and China before deciding to license Sciwind’s molecules. “The size of the fundraising enables us to take our present assets to meaningful points of clinical development, but also allows us to bring in additional assets, if we want to,” he writes. “Our goal is to broaden our focus into the cardiometabolic area.”

Forbion and General Atlantic co-led the financing of Verdiva. They were joined by RA Capital Management, OrbiMed, Logos Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures, and Lyfe Capital.

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