Forbion co-leads €9.5m financing

Forbion Capital Partners, the spin-out of ABN AMRO Capital Life Sciences, has co-led a €9.5m series A financing round for biopharmaceutical company arGEN-X.

arGEN-X will use the funds to develop SIMPLE Antibody and to build a pre-clinical antibody product portfolio.

A syndicate of investors was involved in the financing round that included other co-leader Life Sciences Partners (LSP) as well as, KBC Private Equity, BioGeneration Ventures and existing shareholders Erasmus MC Biomedical Fund and Thuja Capital Healthcare Funds. As part of the deal, Christina Takke of Forbion and John de Koning of LSP joined the arGEN-X supervisory board.

Chairman of the board of arGEN-X, Peter Verhaeghe said: “We are very pleased with this significant equity financing, one of the largest early stage investments in our sector in the past year. The ability to raise this significant financing from such an investor syndicate in a very difficult market is a strong vote of confidence to the potential of the company and its team.”

In January 2007, Forbion spun out from the life sciences venture activities of Dutch bank ABN AMRO to form an independent VC firm. With ABN AMRO and secondaries specialist Coller Capital as founding investors Forbion raised a €200m fund.