• Company established with world-class research from leading industry leaders
• Experienced team advancing therapies for cardiovascular disease

Paris, France, December 09th, 2021 - Corteria Pharmaceuticals, a French biotechnology company specialized in the development of interceptive therapies for heart failure sub-populations, today announced the successful completion of its Seed round, providing €12 million to pursue the development of a series of programs in-licensed from Sanofi S.A. (Paris, France). The seed round was led by Kurma Partners and includes V-Bio Ventures, Omnes and Invivo Capital. As part of the financing, Thierry Laugel (Chair) and Peter Neubeck from Kurma Partners, Ward Capoen from V-Bio Ventures, Claire Poulard from Omnes and Luis Pareras from Invivo Capital will join the Board of Directors.

Heart failure continues to progress despite current standard of care, affecting more than 60M patients worldwide. Corteria’s R&D programs will address the full spectrum of heart failure decompensation and offer opportunities for developing transformative therapies for the treatment of worsening and acute decompensated heart failure.

“Congestion is the main cause of repetitive hospitalization and poor quality of life in heart failure patients. Using a multi-parametric strategy, the present development programs will follow very closely our patients to assess severity of congestion and benefits of those novel therapies in worsening heart failure” said Alexandre Mebazaa, Professor at Université de Paris (France).

“We are proposing a new way for developing drugs in heart failure subpopulations through innovative patient stratification strategy and a better understanding of the human disease biology. In that respect, target selection has been based on the existence of human pharmacology and biomarkers to monitor target engagement in heart failure patients”, said Philip Janiak, founder and CEO of Corteria, and former head of cardiovascular research at Sanofi.

“We are particularly excited to have nurtured Corteria in close working relationship with Philip and his team. Heart failure represents an incredible medical need, that requires medical and pharmacological innovation as well as better patient stratification. We believe Corteria is very well equipped to address these challenges”, said Thierry Laugel, chairman of the Board of Directors.

Marie-Laure Ozoux, co-founder will serve as a CSO in supporting the research effort toward drug candidate selection.

Corteria’s scientific advisory board will be chaired by Pr. Alexandre Mebazaa, and includes Pr. Adriaan Voors (University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands) and Pr. Frank Ruschitzka (University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland).