Clover Biopharmaceuticals, a global clinical-stage biotech company that develops and commercialises transformative biologic therapies, announced on Tuesday the completion of an oversubscribed Series C funding round at $230 million.
The new investment was co-led by Hillhouse Capital’s venture capital (VC) unit GL Ventures and Singapore’s state investment firm Temasek, with participation from Oceanpine Capital, OrbiMed, and Clover’s existing investor Delos Capital. It brought Clover’s total capital raise in the past 12 months to over $400 million.
Clover, which operates from China, will use the new proceeds to fund a pipeline of protein-based vaccines and biologic cancer therapies, including a global Phase 2/3 efficacy trial for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, SCB-2019 (S-Trimer). The efficacy trial is expected to start in H1 2021.
In a statement, Clover said that the new financing would also be used to develop additional vaccines, including multivalent SARS-CoV-2, which covers multiple variants, and vaccines targeting other diseases, as well as cancer therapies.
The firm expects to advance multiple new pipeline products to the clinic in 2021 and further expand in-house R&D and cGMP commercial biomanufacturing capabilities.
Clover said that it had initiated production planning for potentially hundreds of millions of its COVID-19 vaccine doses in 2021.
Founded in 2007, Clover is a clinical-stage, research-based biotech company discovering, developing, and commercialising transformative biologic therapies, with a focus on oncology and autoimmune diseases, as well as viral vaccines. It has grown from a 20-person team to a global R&D team of approximately 450 members.
The China-based firm earlier announced the completion of a $24-million Series B2 round from GL Ventures in June 2020. Prior to that, in November 2019, it had raised $43 million in a Series B round led by Delos Capital and Lapam Capital. In December 2017, it had closed about $9.5 million in a Series A round led by Tianhe Life Sciences Venture Fund.
