From Phar­ma­cia and Lund­beck to No­vo Nordisk and As­traZeneca, the Nordic coun­tries have been the birth­place for some lega­cy phar­ma com­pa­nies. But for all that his­to­ry and rep­u­ta­tion, Stephan Christ­gau counts on­ly five spe­cial­ized life sci­ence in­vestors back­ing biotechs to­day.

That leaves plen­ty of room for Eir Ven­tures, a brand new ven­ture fund Christ­gau — one of the founders of No­vo Seeds — is launch­ing with three oth­er vet­er­an VCs.

Speak­ing to End­points News from Copen­hagen with fel­low man­ag­ing part­ner An­dreas Segerros, he spoke

“You have a num­ber of good clus­ters in the Nordic,” he said, point­ing to the south­ern Swe­den / east­ern Den­mark area known as the Medicon Val­ley, places like Gothen­burg, Stock­holm and even Oslo, Nor­way. “I would say the Nordic re­gion and the hotspots here are top three in Eu­rope. That may be a big word. But yes we have Ox­ford/Cam­bridge, and we maybe have the Paris area, but what we see here are some emerg­ing big list­ed com­pa­nies like Gen­mab and So­bi and so on.”

The in­creas­ing costs of do­ing busi­ness in the US hubs, Segerros added, are start­ing to get pro­hib­i­tive. Be it re­al es­tate, salary or drug de­vel­op­ment, you can do more with your dime in the ar­eas Eir Ven­tures will be op­er­at­ing.

As a re­sult, the firm ex­pects to take a “very mean­ing­ful role and an ac­tive own­er­ship po­si­tion” by putting in be­tween €5 mil­lion and €7 mil­lion, giv­ing them a range of 12 to 16 port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. The ide­al can­di­date will be a lit­tle be­yond dis­cov­ery stage, though Eir Ven­tures does want to in­clude a few lat­er-stage projects in the mix.

Around 5% of the fund — which might bal­loon in­to €100 mil­lion lat­er — will go to around 15 ul­tra ear­ly-stage op­por­tu­ni­ties they call “seedlings.”

“So it will be a con­vert­ible loan, a few hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars, but will be cre­at­ed to fund sort of crit­i­cal killer ex­per­i­ments or oth­er crit­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ties that will make the com­pa­ny fund­able,” Christ­gau said.

Mag­nus Pers­son, who built up Swe­den’s Health­Cap to be one of the rare spe­cial­ist life sci­ence VC play­ers in the Nordics be­fore get­ting re­cruit­ed to The Col­umn Group’s San Fran­cis­co of­fice, is join­ing Christ­gau and Segerros as man­ag­ing part­ner. The trio has al­so wooed Aman­da Hay­ward to be a spe­cial part­ner out of Con­necti­cut while con­tin­u­ing her day job scout­ing new rare dis­ease drugs for Rally­bio.

Al­though Covid-19 has com­pli­cat­ed and de­layed things, caus­ing some be­liev­ers to with­draw, the four an­chor in­vestors are weath­er­ing the storm, the team said. They are Sam­in­vest, a ven­ture cap­i­tal com­pa­ny found­ed by the Swedish Gov­ern­ment, Væk­st­fonden, the Dan­ish state’s in­vest­ment fund, No­vo Hold­ings, as well as the Eu­ro­pean In­vest­ment Fund.

“Copen­hagen or Stock­holm is not Boston, and may nev­er be that,” Christ­gau al­lowed. “But if you go back 20 years, I was — maybe 30 years back. I was at Kendall Square and at that point in time, there was re­al­ly not [much] to write home about with re­gard to life sci­ence. So re­gions can de­vel­op. I’m not sit­ting here say­ing that we be­lieve that we’ll re­pro­duce Kendall Square, but we see a good tra­jec­to­ry of the life sci­ence in­dus­try here and we be­lieve this is the right place to be for a new ven­ture fund.”

A little over six months after the FDA approved the first treatment for peanut allergies, a new biotech has emerged hoping to break through in a field that’s seen virtually no innovation.

IgGenix came out of stealth mode Tuesday morning, announcing a $10 million Series A round to get the company started. The California-based biotech aims to focus not just on peanuts, but all types of food allergies and related serious conditions by developing a platform that can interfere with the allergic cascade. Financing was led by Khosla Ventures and joined by Parker Ventures.

Less than a year after pulling in an impressive $62 million Series C round, PMV Pharma is back at it again.

The Cranbury, NJ-based biotech announced Monday an additional $70 million in Series D financing as it seeks to develop cancer therapies targeting p53 mutations. Additionally, PMV also introduced longtime biotech entrepreneur Rich Heyman as chairman of the board of directors.

“This financing provides PMV Pharma with the resources to expand our pipeline and to potentially advance multiple p53 therapies into the clinic,” said PMV president and CEO David Mack in a statement.

Eli Lilly and the NIH are about to start a first-of-its-kind trial that researchers and developers have talked about for months as a way of providing temporary immunity to the most at-risk populations.

Lilly announced this morning that it will start a 2,400-person trial with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to test whether its experimental Covid-19 neutralizing antibody can prevent people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities from developing the disease. The idea, known as passive immunity, is that rather than waiting on a vaccine to induce people to develop antibodies, doctors can give them lab-grown antibodies. Ideally, those antibodies will either attack the new SARS-CoV-2 infection, if the patient has recently been exposed, or persist in the blood for several weeks and prevent infection or disease for that period.