CoDa raises NZ$25m to fund wound treatment

New Zealand's CoDa Therapeutics has secured an NZ$24.5 million ($19.4 million) investment from Russia's RusnanoMedInvest as part of a series B financing round.

CoDa, a clinical stage biotech concentrating on wound healing and tissue repair, has now received a total of NZ$49 billion in the series B round. All the company's current investors have participated in the round.

Part of the proceeds will be used to fund the commercialisation process for CoDa's lead product in development, wound therapy Nexagon.

Nexagon is a topically-applied therapy utilising a new technique known as gap junction modulation. Its active ingredient is an unmodified antisense oligonucleotide shown to down-regulate gap junction protein connexin43.

CoDa's research indicates that this protein is wrongly up-regulated at the edge of human chronic, difficult to heal wounds. Connexin43 is believed to be a cause of unwanted inflammation or stalled healing in these wounds.

To accompany the RusnanoMedInvest agreement, CoDa has licensed its intellectual property rights to the Russian market, in exchange for an upfront license fee and royalties on sales of Nexagon.

In-house, CoDa is currently involved in late-stage clinical trials of Nexagon as a treatment for certain types of ulcers, and proceeds from the financing round will help fund the process.

CoDa recently commenced a 160 patient trial in diabetic foot ulcers in the US, and will expand this to sites in Russia within months.

A separate 300 patient phase IIb trial using the treatment for venous leg ulcers is under way in New Zealand, the US and South Africa.

CoDa Therapeutics was founded in 2005 based on research from the University of Auckland's Professor Colin Green. The company has offices in San Diego and Auckland, with around 70% of its staff employed in New Zealand.