- The financing, led by Forbion and Novo Holdings, will support Orbis’ expansion and advancement of its portfolio of next-generation macrocycle drugs called ‘nCycles’
- Orbis’ platform is the first to systematically explore the macrocycle chemical space using AI-enabled high-throughput chemical synthesis and large-scale assaying of real compounds
- Pipeline to initially focus on high-value oral alternatives to blockbuster biologic drugs and opening new targets to therapeutic intervention
- Orbis Medicines marks the sixth investment from Forbion’s Ventures VI Fund
Naarden, The Netherlands – February 29, 2024 – Forbion, a leading European life sciences venture capital firm, today announces that it has co-led, together with Novo Holdings, a €26 million financing round in Orbis Medicines. The funding will support Orbis’ expansion and advancement of its portfolio of next-generation macrocycle drugs, a large and diverse family of compounds with highly desirable therapeutic properties, it calls ‘nCycles’. nCycles are systematically designed by the company’s nGen1 AI platform to be orally bioavailable and membrane permeable, solving decades-long challenges in macrocycle drug design.
The Orbis pipeline includes programs against targets validated by blockbuster biologic drugs, with the goal of providing oral alternatives that will enable the treatment of many more patients. In addition, Orbis is developing a pipeline of nCycles for other attractive target classes, both intra- and extra-cellular.
The investment in Orbis Medicines marks the sixth investment from Forbion’s Ventures VI Fund which raised €750 million in 2023. The fund aims to build a portfolio of highly impactful therapeutics companies and builds on the firm’s strong track record from previous Forbion funds.
The broad potential of oral macrocycle drugs to address challenging targets untouchable by small molecules makes this an incredibly exciting opportunity. There is growing momentum in this field of drug development. We believe Orbis’ combinatorial approach and ability to continuously generate big data from real compounds puts them in a very strong position to unlock the potential of orally available macrocycle drugs for significantly larger patient populations.
Marco Boorsma, Ph.D.
General Partner at Forbion
Orbis was founded in 2021 by the Seeds Investment team of Novo Holdings, with Morten Døssing as Executive Chair, and João Ribas as interim CBO, establishing the company’s team and building its corporate strategy. The scientific foundation of Orbis was developed by Prof. Christian Heinis and Sevan Habeshian at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
The chemical methods by which Orbis rapidly generates vast libraries of diverse macrocycle compounds ready for immediate assay were previously published in Nature Communications. Authors of the paper, which included Orbis’ founders Professor Heinis and Dr. Habeshian, detail how the methods draw on a large range of components to build compounds, including both natural and synthetic amino acids, creating an extremely large chemical space for exploration. Additionally, research recently published in Nature Chemical Biology demonstrates nGen’s ability to deliver nCycles that are orally bioavailable, marking a new era for macrocycle drug discovery.
