Gene therapy firm Next Generation Gene Therapeutics (诺洁贝) has secured $40 million in a Series B financing round led by Shanghai Healthcare Capital, an investment fund set up by state-owned conglomerate Shanghai Industrial Investment Holdings（上海生物医药基金）
The round, participated by local investors including DT Capital Partners（德同资本）and ZX Capital（中鑫资本）, will help to finance the pre-clinical and stage development of NGGT's products. Previous backers including Beijing Wedo Capital Management（苇渡资本）and Northern Light Venture Capital（北极光创投）have also re-upped in the round.
NGGT, founded in March 2020 by senior scientists and entrepreneurs in the field of gene therapy, is a healthcare company that engages in the research and development of gene therapy. It is committed to becoming the world's leading gene therapy company with international influence. The company has successful experience in the whole industry chain, concerning the early development of gene therapy products, the large-scale production of viral vectors, the construction of quality standards, international multi-center clinical research, and the application for the marketing of gene therapy products.
The Suzhou-based firm saw NGGTo1one of its gene therapy drugs under its pipeline that targets inherited retinal dystrophies(IRD), genetic eye conditions that could lead to vision loss or legal blindness, received an Investigational New Drug(IND) Application approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in April this year. Its unique proprietary technology of "one target and two bullets" can provide effective treatment for a variety of genetic diseases that currently have few therapeutic methods in the world.
Since 2017, the Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT) industry has continued to make breakthroughs, with landmark CGT products such as Kymriah, Luxturna, and Zolgensma being approved by the FDA. Rapid growth in the number of CGT-related clinical trials in China - According to a report by Frost & Sullivan, China will conduct a total of about 250 CGT clinical trials from 2015 to 2020, making China second only to the United States in terms of the number of clinical trials conducted, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 60%, ranking first in the world. , ranking first in the world. In terms of market share in 2020, WuXi AT（药明生基） ranks at the top in China with a market share of 55.86%, followed by OBiO（和元生物） and GenScript（金斯瑞）, with market shares of 7.65% and 3.1%, respectively.