AC Immune raises SFr21 million to combat Alzheimer’s

Andrea Pfeiffer, CEO and co-founder of AC Immune swissinfo.ch

The biotechnology company, based in Ecublens, is developing vaccines and therapies to combat the causes of Alzheimer's disease.

It announced this week a SFr21 million ($17 million) Series B financing round from unnamed private and strategic investors.

A strong management team and a significantly sized “market opportunity” gave investors confidence to sign up for the financing round.

In the past, biotechnology companies in Europe tended to be formed researchers and scientists, but in this case two of the three founders of AC Immune, are not only scientifically gifted, both have industry experience and know how to commercialize lab developments and discoveries.

AC Immune’s CEO is Andrea Pfeiffer, the former head of global research at Vevey-based Nestle, and a professor of biotechnology at the University of Lausanne. She left Nestlé where she had not only managed a group of more than 800 people, but she also established the Nestle Venture Capital Fund, a 100 million euro corporate venture fund, where she remains an advisor.

Female director

Pfeiffer told swissinfo’s Swiss Venture that while she had a top job at Nestlé and was one of “the few female directors” there, she had a strong desire to start her own company.

Industry insiders are already drawing parallels between AC Immune’s CEO and Alice Huxley, the CEO of up and coming Speedel Pharma AG, based in Basel.

Besides the fact that both company chiefs are female and both left high-powered jobs in industry to start their own biotechnology companies, what is more interesting is that both have taken the unusual step of eschewing venture capital in preference to other types of investors.

By avoiding venture capital, the founders tend to be able to keep a greater share of their companies, but also are not subject to the influence of venture fund managers.

Typically, venture backers often get a board seat when they invest and a large chunk of the company shares. The board seat enables them to exert pressure on the management team to grow the firm faster, slower, or in a therapeutic direction the investor thinks is compelling.

Life science venture investors in Europe are also know to be pushing companies into merger and acquisition activity, getting CEOs to buy other start-up companies, to build theoretically stronger companies.

Tighter control

Not that there is anything wrong with any of this activity per se, it is just that some entrepreneurial CEOs have decided to avoid that added distraction and retain a tighter control of their companies.

Other founders include Claude Nicolau, chief science officer, and Ruth Greferath, director of biology. Nicolau has recent experience in establishing a life science company, as he is a co-founder of Alantos Pharmaceuticals AG, Heidelberg in Southern Germany, which recently moved its headquarters to Cambridge, Mass. in the US. The firm has raised more than
$20 million in equity financing in March.

Nicolau is also a distinguished scientist, reporting the first gene transfer and expression in a live animal, plus he has developed protein-to-cell transfer techniques and has been working on an immunotherapy for Alzheimer’s for several years.

Greferath is director of biology at AC Immune. She is the co-inventor of so-called conformation-sensitive, therapeutic antibodies. Since 2000, she has been a research scientist at the Institut de Recherche contre les Cancers de l’Appareil Digestif in Strasbourg, France.

Result of ageing

Besides the management team, the firm has a large market opportunity. AC immune says that a certain type of plaque build-up in the brain, believed to be a cause Alzheimer’s disease, occurs in most people and is a natural result of aging. The start-up aims to develop a vaccination that would stop or slow this plaque-building process in the brain.

The market for such a vaccine would certainly qualify as a “blockbuster”, as industry insiders say. “There is an outstanding market opportunity in Alzheimer’s and conformational diseases,” said Martin Velasco, chairman of the board at AC Immune said in a statement.

“Our investors and management share a common vision to leverage AC Immune’s innovative approach in order to efficiently bring therapeutic solutions to the market,” he added.

AC Immune will use the influx of capital to complete Phase 2 or human trials in 2006 and 2007 of at least one molecule in development. “We will not seek further financing until we have the trial data in hand,” said Pfeiffer.

At the moment AC Immune has three molecules in its pipeline. It plans to increase that number by participating in collaborative R&D with as yet unnamed pharmaceutical partners. The two-year-old company had raised SFr3 million in a Series A round prior to this one.

By Valerie Thompson