Treatment Research gets New Infusion of Cash for a Global Biotech Trio

So far, treatment Research has had a nice week, with three more big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies announcing the successful completion of their various funding rounds to support future efforts. Rakuten Medical raised $166 million in Series D preferred stock financing, which included the conversion of $91 million in convertible promissory notes and $75 million in new capital.

General Catalyst led the fundraising drive, but it was backed by a number of other existing investors, including SBI Group and Rakuten Group. The majority of the funds raised will go toward speeding up Research on ASP-1929, the company’s main medicine, which was licenced in Japan in September 2020 for the treatment of unresectable locally advanced or locally recurrent head and neck cancer.

Rakuten hopes to capitalise on this momentum by using its Illuminox platform to assess the drug’s efficacy in various types of therapy. Illuminox is a photoimmunotherapy-based experimental platform, and ASP-1929 is one of the first medications created with it. Bota Bio, a global industrial biotechnology company, has announced the completion of its $100 million Series B investment round. Sequoia Capital China led the charge, with earlier backers including Sherpa Healthcare Partners, Matrix Partners China, Source Code Capital, and 5Y Capital, among others.

Bota Bio’s Series B funding have now reached $145 million as a result of this latest venture. Bota Bio said the money will be used to extend its global reach and create its lab-to-pilot scale platform for the quick scale-up and deployment of its consumer products, food, nutritional, and pharmaceutical product pipelines, according to a statement.Bota Bio was formed in 2019 by industry leaders and scientists with the goal of integrating digital technologies with laboratory automation through a technological platform called Bota Freeway. The company’s main purpose is to develop biologically produced alternatives to fossil-fuel-based, energy-intensive products and processes.