Ysios Capital Partners, a biotech-specialised venture capital firm based in San Sebastian and Barcelona, has joined forces with four other international investors to secure financing of the American company BioVex. BioVex develops new generation biologics for the prevention and treatment of cancer and infectious diseases.

The complete placement, which also includes the company’s current specialised investors, Forbion, Scottish Equity Partners and Credit Agricole Private Equity among others, raised 70 million dollars, making it one of the biggest transactions in the area of biotechnology venture capital this year at international level.

Together with Ysios Capital Partners, top-level investors such as Morningside Venture, MVM Life Science Partners, Ventech and Sectoral Asset Management have taken part in this operation, which will enable BioVex to complete the clinical studies for Phase III of its drug OncoVEX. This drug is an oncolytic virus developed for the treatment of recurrent and metastatic melanoma, and it has successfully performed in Phase II clinical trials, recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

According to the president and managing director of BioVex, Philip Astley-Sparke, “This operation is a milestone in the history of the company, as it puts us in a solid financial position for completing the last, key study with OncoVEX for metastatic melanoma, so that we will be able to apply to the FDA for a licence to sell OncoVEX by the middle of 2011”.

The placement in BioVex is the third investment Ysios has completed via its fund, Ysios BioFund I, the largest venture capital fund specialising in innovative life science companies in the Spanish market.

Moreover, the venture capital company is working on a fourth investment before the end of the year. “It is quite possible that by the end of the year we may invest in the Spanish biotechnology companies that we have in an advanced phase of analysis, all of which are in earlier stages of development than the three previous investments, but present some pretty attractive expectations on value creation, for which we will invite other specialised investors to further rounds of financing”, emphasised Julia Salaverría, partner at Ysios.