
RA, Jeito and Omega back a small Swiss biotech to enter an I/O field paved by Adaptimmune
A licensing deal worth up to $520 million has been fueling little-known Swiss biotech CDR-Life since May 2020, but the five-year-old startup is ready to haul in traditional venture capital financing.

After Boehinger Ingelheim fully took control of the duo’s collaboration on a preclinical antibody for geographic atrophy — one of the leading causes of blindness — last summer, CDR-Life went to work finding investors to take its platform forward in solid tumors. Filling that funding role are RA Capital Management and Rafaèle Tordjman’s Jeito Capital, who are co-leading CDR-Life’s $76 million Series A with help from Otello Stampacchia’s Omega Funds.
“We didn’t need the Series A as early as you might otherwise perhaps need. The timing is perfect now. We are a little over a year from the clinic with our primary project and we wanted to raise the funds to move that project to clinical proof of concept,” CEO Christian Leisner told Endpoints News.

The biotech will enter the clinic sometime next year to gear up its first human study for clinical proof of concept in cancer around 2025, Leisner said. Prior to co-founding CDR-Life in 2017, Leisner was a unit leader for early development programs in ophthalmology at ESBATech, a Novartis company, and before that held various roles at NIBR and elsewhere across the Big Pharma.
CDR-Life’s lead candidate, CDR404, is a dual MAGE-A4 T cell engager that is going after lung, bladder and esophageal cancers. MAGE-A4 is an “incredibly attractive” target because of its uniqueness to tumor tissues, Leisner said. “You won’t find them much in healthy cells contrary to many other cancer targets,” he added.
Adaptimmune has been a leading biotech in the MAGE-A4 field and plans to ask the FDA to approve its drug afami-cel for the treatment of advanced/metastatic synovial sarcoma in the fourth quarter of this year, the company said last month. Leisner called Adaptimmune’s MAGE-A4 program “really encouraging, showing us that the target is likely to really work in patients with these types of therapies.”
Behind CDR404 are three discovery-stage assets — named 505, 106 and 304.
Beyond those, CDR-Life wants to link arms with another partner, in a similar deal to the BI one, for CDR101, which targets multiple myeloma.
The Swiss upstart has “preclinical data showing that this molecule is superior to BCMA therapies that are currently in clinical development from a number of companies,” Leisner said. “We think we have a good licensing data package, and we would like to focus our own efforts on the solid tumor programs.”
Alongside Leisner, the founding team includes chairman Dominik Escher, CFO Konstantin von Schulthess, CSO Leonardo Borras and technical development chief Rouven Bingel-Erlenmeyer. The group has worked on new antibody drugs before, including the FDA-approved Beovu, a Novartis treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration.