Drug Developer Greatsun Completes Series A Funding Worth Tens of Mns of CNY

Healthcare Author: Siren Chen May 12, 2022 11:04 PM (GMT+8)

Founded in 2011, Greatsun is an innovative drug R&D biotech in China. The company develops active targeting drug delivery nanocarriers and biological macromolecular drugs.

Biotechnology

Beijing Greatsun Biomedical Technology (Chinese: 格瑞特森) raised tens of millions of CNY from a Series A financing round. This round of funding was jointly invested by Longyu Hongda Investment Management (Chinese: 隆裕弘达), Guoxin Haixiang (Chinese: 国信海翔) and Henan Jinggang Advanced Manufacturing Industry Equity Investment Fund (Chinese: 河南京港先进制造业股权投资基金).

The company develops nano-enabled drug targeting technology to build an efficient long-circulating liposome modified with oligopeptides to deliver the doxorubicin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic used in the treatment of cancers.

At present, various generic version of doxorubicin hydrochloride liposomal injection is manufactured by Fudan-Zhangjiang Bio-Pharmaceutical, Kinyond and CSPC Pharmaceutical Group. And the generic product is used to treat ovarian cancer, breast cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, and multiple myeloma. Greatsun is carrying out the preclinical study of doxorubicin encapsulated in a new peptide, c(RGD-ACP-K), modified long-circulating liposomes to treat liver cancer.

Greatsun is also dedicated to the research of biological macromolecular drugs. Typically, CHO (Chinese hamster ovary) cells are the go-to cell line for the clinical and commercial production of therapeutic antibodies and proteins. However, the CHO cell line faces some challenges such as long cycles in construction and fermentation, small-scale production, genetic instability and high cost.

Pichia pastoris, a yeast strain used as an expression system for producing proteins may solve the above problems. The company has three products using P. pastoris as a recombinant expression host system and is expected to be approved to carry out clinical trials within two years.  

GENEKINE Biotechnology (Chinese: 菁因康生物) and Novamab (Chinese: 洛启生物) are the counterparts of Greatsun.