Innate immunity merger raises €75m

Dutch Oxitope and Norwegian Arxx announced their merger to form Calluna Pharma Inc with the goal to develop therapies for inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. The newly formed company is backed by Oxitope’s and Arxx’ investors, raised €75m in a Series A financing. The Series A was led by European VC investor Forbion, while Norwegian investors Sarsia, p53 and Investinor participated.

Calluna is bringing together Arxx’ and Oxitope’s expertise in the field of innate immunity.  It’s approach targets upstream innate immune amplifiers, enabling disruption of a range of disease-associated downstream signaling pathways while maintaining a favourable safety profile. Calluna’s pipeline includes four selective antibodies, targeting immunological diseases. Its clinical stage lead programme, CAL101, is a monoclonal antibody that neutralises the bioactivity of S100A4, a DAMP protein implicated in serious and life-threatening diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, chronic kidney disease, systemic sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and severe (steroid insensitive) asthma. CAL101 is in Phase 1 for fibrosis and inflammation indications, which Phase Iia trials scheduled to start in 2026.

The company’s board of directors will include John Montana, Operating Partner (Forbion), as CEO, Antoine Boulanger, Principal (Forbion), Susanne Stuffers (p53), Farzad Abdi-Dezfuli General Partner (Sarsia), and Marco Boorsma, General Partner (Forbion) as Chairman. The Company is raising further financing to develop its pipeline to multiple key clinical milestones over the next 2.5 years