Monday, October 7

Bengaluru-based Mitra Biotech Raises $40 million

Mitra Biotech, a Bengaluru-based oncology solutions firm has reportedly secured funds amounting to $40 million (about Rs 270 crore) in a Series-C funding round. The following round was led by Northpond Ventures based in Maryland.

The existing investors that participated in the funding round were Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, RA Capital Management and Tata Capital.

“Northpond is excited to join Mitra, as the CANscript platform has the potential to meaningfully improve how we treat cancer patients,” said Michael P Rubin, CEO at Northpond Ventures.

The funds so raised will be utilized by the company for commercial and trade expansion. A part of funds will also be used for completing the required data generation to get reimbursement coverage for a broad category of cancer indications.

Founded in 2010, the company is basically focused on providing personalized oncology treatment and support more effective cancer drug development. Mitra Biotech also works closely with biopharma clients from project development and sample acquisition to execution.

The company’s platform CANscript allows the physicians to choose the most favourable drug combination by testing a tumour sample against various drug combinations simultaneously in a laboratory. With this funding round, the total funding of the company as of now has reached $76 million.

“The company is working on insurance coverage of CANscript for broad cancer indications for multiple classes of drugs in advanced settings,” Mallikarjun Sundaram, the chief executive officer of Mitra Biotech said. “We are working with more than 15 companies and carrying out around 50 projects,” he added.

Currently, Mitra Biotech has 150 employees where 50 are in the US and 100 are in Bengaluru. They are associated with over 30 centres in the US and 40 centres in India. The company is also eyeing to get listed on Nasdaq between the time period of 2020 to 2021.