Europe’s medical equipment venture capital community is celebrating a rare $1bn exit of a biotechnology investment, after US-listed Amgen agreed to acquire BioVex, a cancer vaccine developer that spun out of University College London a decade ago.
BioVex has raised $150m from more than a dozen venture capital groups. It has developed a genetically-modified virus called OncoVex that destroys cancer cells when injected into patients suffering from skin, head and neck cancer.
Amgen is paying $425m in cash, with as much as $575m of future payments being conditional on the company hitting certain regulatory and sales milestones. The deal represents one of the biggest exits of a venture capital-backed biotechnology company for many years and is a boost for the ailing European venture capital industry which has struggled with a dearth of big success stories.
Founded by Robert Coffin, a former University College London researcher who is now its chief technology officer, BioVex has moved its headquarters to the US, near Boston, but still does research in the UK at a facility in Oxfordshire.
The company has started advanced clinical trials of OncoVex in 80 hospitals around the world and if these are completed successfully, it aims to file for a biologics licence from the Food and Drug Administration in the US later this year.
“OncoVex has demonstrated encouraging anti-tumour activity in clinical studies for the treatment of melanoma and head and neck cancer and BioVex is currently enrolling patients into pivotal Phase 3 trials in both indications,” said Roger Perlmutter, Amgen’s executive vice-president.
The main venture capital backers of BioVex, who supported a $70m round of financing two years ago, include Scottish Equity Partners in the UK, Forbion in the Netherlands, Morningside of Hong Kong, Crédit Agricole of France and New Science Ventures of the US.
The deal comes as Amgen seeks to refresh its pipeline with new experimental drugs, following a series of setbacks and pressures from generic rivals on the Nasdaq-listed group’s existing products. It also signals resurgent work around cancer vaccines.
Vaccines already exist to prevent infections for Hepatitis B and HPV, which can cause liver and cervical cancer respectively.
Dendreon last year received US regulatory approval for Provenge, a therapeutic vaccine to treat prostate cancer. Others including BioSante Pharmaceuticals have products in advanced clinical testing.

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