Amolyt Pharma: The Making of a $1bn Biotech

Thierry Abribat’s first two biopharma companies collectively raised more than €15m, brought multiple drugs to the market and attracted bids from U.S. buyers. But his experience in the early 2000s underscored the challenges startups faced on the road to commercializing novel medicines.

“It was very difficult at the time to raise money to properly finance a biotech,” Abribat says.

Many founders would have stopped there. Abribat kept going. After building Alizé Pharma and Alizé Pharma II, the scientist and entrepreneur decided to launch a third company, focusing on meeting a significant need among patients with rare endocrine diseases. He believed that his new company, later rebranded as Amolyt Pharma, could be the most successful one yet.

Based in Lyon, France, Amolyt partnered with a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, and began developing a treatment for hypoparathyroidism, a disease affecting more than 220,000 people in the U.S. and the EU, about 80 percent of whom are women.

Patients with the disorder can suffer uncontrollable, painful muscle spasms and seizures due to a calcium imbalance. While treatments exist, they often cause chronic kidney disease and bone damage. The team’s candidate, eneboparatide, showed early promise in eliminating these side effects.

By early 2018, meanwhile, “the European VC industry had matured a lot,” Abribat says. “More funds, larger funds, and even more importantly, their managing partners had acquired very significant experience.”

Getting their new treatment to the market, however, would require a sizable investment.

Phase one

From the first meeting with Abribat in 2019, LSP, the European life sciences fund which would later become EQT Life Sciences, was impressed. “We thought that the asset was differentiated, and we bought into [Amolyt’s] thesis,” says Felice Verduyn-van Weegen, a partner at EQT Life Sciences.

The team Abribat had built was attractive too. Amolyt brought in Michael Culler, a prominent expert in endocrinology and a former National Institutes of Health researcher, as chief science officer. That was “definitely a selling point for many of the investors,” says Verduyn-van Weegen.

Investment in early-stage science is high risk. But Verduyn-van Weegen and her team felt that not only was it a chance worth taking, but Amolyt’s initial funding target – around €30m to €35m – wasn’t ambitious enough to cover the clinical trials and unlock the value of the company’s experimental treatment.

LSP went on to lead an initial €67m funding round – a record for a French startup at the time – joined by Novo Ventures, Kurma Partners and OrbiMed, among others. Amolyt expanded its team in Lyon, opened a subsidiary in Boston, and launched the first phase of its clinical trials.

Doubling down

The next challenge was execution.

Verduyn-van Weegen and her colleagues helped shape the business plan, broaden the team, evaluate strategy, and assemble the board. Pierre Legault was appointed chairman, while Dr. Elisabeth Svanberg, an expert in the development of therapies for endocrine and metabolic diseases, and James Hindman, a 30-year industry veteran, were recruited to strengthen scientific and financial oversight.

In September 2021, with promising early results, Amolyt announced another round of financing. “We had such high conviction in the science, and we were the biggest supporters at the time, so we really doubled down,” the EQT partner says.

When the next investment, known as Series C, followed in early 2023, the mid-stage data had de-risked the investment considerably. “That’s when the crossover investors came in,” she says. The market was starting to see what EQT had believed from the start.

The exit

To take Amolyt to the next level and bring eneboparatide to market, more capital was required. “If you want to launch a product on the market, that is such a costly endeavor that you almost need to go public,” Verduyn-van Weegen says.

With EQT’s support, Amolyt prepared to list – while keeping one eye on the possibility of a buyout. Preparing for an IPO signaled that Amolyt could launch the product independently, while also inviting interest from potential buyers and strengthening its negotiating position.

As the final stage of clinical studies got underway, interest from multiple pharma groups crystallized. EQT remained an active shareholder. “We still had a very prominent voice on the board,” Verduyn-van Weegen notes, helping the company weigh its strategic options.

In early 2024, Alexion, AstraZeneca’s rare-disease unit, acquired Amolyt for up to $1.05bn – marking a third successful exit for Abribat. Under its new ownership, eneboparatide is now progressing through phase 3 trials, with initial results looking promising. For the hundreds of thousands of patients living with hypoparathyroidism around the world, a life-changing treatment might not be far away.