Cothera Bioscience Raises $30 million in Series B financing

(VCBeat) Jan. 19, 2021 -- Cothera Bioscience has raised nearly $30 million in a Series B financing led by Tsing Song Capital, with participation from the new investors including CMB International, Sherpa Venture Capital, New World (China) Investment, Lang Sheng Investment, Kunlun Fund, Harbinger Venture joining the existing group of Legend Capital and Legend Star. CEC Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor in this transaction.

The funds raised will be used towards the development of Cothera Bioscience's innovative oncology drugs worldwide.

Cothera Bioscience was founded by the founding team of the original famous CRO CrownBio, focusing on the R&D of targeted cancer drugs. Through its self-developed i-CR^® technology platform combined with the conditional reprogramming (CR) technology for the culture of primary tumor cells and high-content screening (HCS) system, the company can efficiently and indiscriminately expand the primary tumor cells of patients in vitro, preserving the heterogeneity of patients' tumors. At the same time, supported by the high-content drug screening system, the primary tumor cells of patients are used for efficient drug screening in vitro, which is more suitable for the R&D and individualized screening of new drugs clinically.

Through cooperation with China's top cancer medical centers, the company has carried out a number of prospective comparative clinical trials, which have initially proved that the i-CR^® system can predict the actual clinical response of drugs, which is expected to significantly improve the efficiency and success rate of the clinical development of anti-cancer drugs.

Using the i-CR^® technology platform with high relevance to clinical drug responses, Cothera Bioscience has developed a series of pipelines for cancer in the fields of synthetic lethality and immunotherapy. Meanwhile, the company has applied for a number of international and domestic patents based on its preliminary research results.

Founded in 2017, Qingsong Capital focuses on the healthcare sector. Since then, the company has completed nearly ten investments, projects covering Internet medical, biological drugs, gene technology, AI in medicine and other cutting-edge fields of the healthcare industry.

CMB International is an investment banking firm that offers comprehensive professional services and financial advisory services. It provides mergers and acquisitions, initial public offering, equity underwriting, company restructuring, project financing, and business consulting services.