Namemei Completes ￥30M Angel Round of Financing

According to VCBeat, Nanjing Namemei Technology Co., Ltd. ("Namemei") announced the closure of an angel round financing of 30 million yuan from the healthcare innovation fund under the management of Oceanpine Healthcare Fund.

Sun Guoming, CEO of Namemei, said that proceeds of the latest round will be mainly used for the development of the ferritin-based nanoenzyme drug delivery system by cooperating with Nanoenzyme Engineering Laboratory of Chinese Academy of Sciences, clinical researches, and the certification for the drug delivery system as mentioned above.

Established in early 2020 and located in Nanjing Biotech and Pharmaceutical Valley, Namemei is a high-tech company engaged in research and development of drug delivery with ferritin-based nanoenzymes as carriers. Yan Xiyun, chairman and chief scientist of the company, is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and President of the Asian Biophysics Association (ABA).

Ferritin has been widely used as a nanocarrier to deliver various drugs for cancer therapy, which can improve accuracy and efficiency in treatment, has been highly appraised by the academic, business and medical communities. By biomimetically synthesizing nanozymes inside the ferritin protein shells, artificial ferritin nanozymes are introduced, which possess the advantages of versatile self-assembly ferritin nanocage and enzymatic activity of nanozymes. 

At present, many pharmaceutical companies in the world are working on the development of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), and the ferritin nanozyme drug delivery system also can actively targeting cancer cells. It can carry hundreds of anticancer molecules at the same time. Taking doxorubicin as an example, it is reported that the nanocages of one molecular of ferritin can load 200 molecules of doxorubicin, which greatly improves the efficiency of drug delivery and tumor targeting.

Sun Guoming said that the patent application for the drug delivery system has been commissioned by a patent law firm, which has come to an end, and the intellectual property work will come to an end. For mass production, Namemei will then look for CRO and CDMO services for the ferritin nanoenzyme drug delivery system. Since the source of ferritin is mainly made from prokaryotic fermentation, the production cost will be greatly reduced, which is conducive to market promotion.

Oceanpine Healthcare Fund is a healthcare venture fund that aims to connect innovation in the US to the Chinese consumer base, and primarily invests in Chinese and US firms with core technologies and proprietary R&D capabilities.