Balmes Transplantation raises €700,000 in seed funding

Published: 7-Feb-2018

Balmes Transplantation has raised €700,000 in seed funding from the company's top executives, Patrick Berna (founder and CEO), Guillaume Demarne (CBDO) and from a group of angel investors

Balmes Transplantation is an early stage innovative biotech company specialising in the fast development of combinations of re-purposed drugs against kidney ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI).

These funds, combined with the €900,000 previously raised by the company since its creation, will be used to perform in vivo proof-of-concept studies of Balmes Transplantation's first molecule combinations in two separate renal indications sharing IRI as a pathophysiological mechanism: cardiac surgery-associated acute kidney injury (CSA-AKI) and delayed graft function (DGF) in kidney transplantation (KTx).

Balmes Transplantation combines existing drugs to yield synergistic, innovative effects capable of acting simultaneously on different components of ischemia-reperfusion injuries.

The pharmacological treatments of Balmes Transplantation can therefore address unmet needs by extracting the latent value of mature drugs in pathologies involving large numbers of patients as well as in orphan indications.

"Privation and subsequent restoration of blood flow to an organ triggers deleterious tissue reactions such as innate immunity activation or generation of oxidative stress, which result in kidney cell death through specific mechanisms (apoptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis)."

"In contrast to monotherapies that only treat one element of the problem at a time and that have proven to be ineffective in humans to date, our combination drugs are able to simultaneously act on several biochemical cascades during ischemia/reperfusion, thus increasing their chances of success in patients in this complex pathophysiology," said Patrick Berna, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Balmes Transplantation.

"The small molecules we use for our proprietary combinations are also proven drugs that are already marketed in other indications on the European and US markets, which allows us to shorten the development timeline of our products. Our subsequent ambition is to test one drug candidate in each indication in phase II clinical trials by 2020."

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