"The newer investors...deciding 'wow this is a new technology and... if they can do it in ALS they can do it in other CNS diseases."
This short clip comes from our chat with Sander van Deventer of VectorY where he shares how he raised Europe's largest biotech series A of 2023.
"With that shift in perception means also the potential is bigger."
An inspiring story 🚀
You can find more short clips of past interviews on YouTube.
I want to start with with actually this user, I mean 129 million euros, I think let's say 130. I mean it's I think the largest Series A this year, one of the largest ever. I mean, European standards is ripping, but I've heard also it took a bit longer to close than expected. Can you maybe share what what happened? Yeah. So basically I think there were two factors here. So the company started as a. A gene therapy company advertising basically it being a gene therapy company. And as we developed the technology, it turned out that most of the value actually is in the ability to to address difficult issues in purchase stages in neurons. So, so actually from the delivery side of things like we still like the delivery being a gene therapy because it's a one off therapy that will work for a very long period of time. Which is really nice when you do that in the CNS, the focus shifted more and more to to the business side of things. You know what exactly we are expressing. And so you know if you look at the efforts here in the company, by far the most effort actually is in the Biner technology and the ability to distinguish between misfolded and non misfolded native proteins, natively folded proteins. And so we actually found in the TD. Court Street ALS program, there are some unique features here that is that at the same time. You can address again of talks. Problem, whereas you also have an important loss of function problem and that put us on a really nice place. And so, yeah, some of the investors who looked at the company early looked at it like there we have another gene therapy company doing a sort of orphan ILS approach or something like that to the newer. Investors who came in later or looked at it later, you know, deciding, wow, this is a new technology and they can really do it. And if they can do it in less, they can do it in other CNS diseases. So they're just basically the the shift of perception that we got at factory. And I guess was that shift also means also the potential is bigger as well. Yeah. Because, you know, just to give you an example, in ALS, of course, you have, you know, really good. Data for SOD one now and there's academic data on fuzz, but those are the genetic forms of ALS and together or you know all the genetic forms of fails together or maybe 7% of LS. OK, not technology that we developed this for all sporadic. So sporadic seems like more rare form. It actually more than 95% of 93 or 95% very less. So the market is enormously larger. Also for for for our product and it is for product targeting, so one.
