Global Health Sciences Fund (Quark Venture LP and GF Securities) Announces Portfolio Company SQZ Biotechnologies’ IPO
November 09, 2020 – Vancouver, BC: Quark Venture LP (Quark) and GF Securities are pleased to announce the successful listing of portfolio company, SQZ Biotechnologies (NYSE: SQZ) (“SQZ”) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as of October 30, 2020. This announcement marks Global Health Sciences (GHS) Fund’s third portfolio company to successfully go public after Eloxx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., (NASDAQ: ELOX) in April 2018 and Keros Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: KROS) in April 2020.
As one of the early investors in SQZ in 2016, alongside Polaris Partners, NanoDimension and GV (formerly Google Ventures), Quark has continued to support the growth of the company to advance its proprietary CellSqueeze® technology and it’s application in developing impactful cell therapies for patients. The SQZ technology was invented by company founder and CEO Armon Sharei based on the research of his team in the laboratories of Klavs Jensen and Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. The company focuses on developing transformative cell therapies for patients with cancer, infectious diseases, and other serious conditions. Using its proprietary technology, SQZ has the unique ability to engineer almost any cell type and deliver multiple materials, potentially resulting in powerful, multifunctional cell therapies for a range of diseases. In 2018 Roche expanded on its existing partnership with SQZ to develop SQZ APC in oncology and SQZ is currently enrolling patients in their Phase I trial for SQZ-PBMC-HPV for patients with HPV16+ tumors.
“We were always confident about the company’s ground-breaking work to enable the development of innovative cell therapies. By physically squeezing cells, effectively opening the cell membrane and allowing desired cargo to diffuse inside, SQZ’s proprietary technology overcomes the limitations of current cell therapies. SQZ’s news coupled with our portfolio company Keros Therapeutics’s recent IPO, marks another milestone for our GHS Fund this year, especially during this challenging time of pandemic and economic volatility,” said Karimah Es Sabar, CEO & Partner, Quark Venture and Director of the GHS Fund.
About Quark Venture LP
Quark Venture LP is a global venture capital company, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with a health investment portfolio. Focused on equity financing of innovative life science companies with breakthrough discovery and innovation, led by outstanding scientific and business teams, our strategic goal is to identify early stage companies and support their growth and development of innovative health solutions.
For information about Quark Venture and its innovative health enterprise portfolio, please visit www.quarkventure.com.
About Global Health Sciences Fund
Global Health Science [GHS] Fund is a joint venture between Quark Venture LP and GF Securities established in 2016. The Fund is a diversified health sciences focused fund investing globally in innovative biotechnology and health technology companies addressing unmet medical needs through innovations in drug development, medical devices, digital health, big data/AI in health and emerging convergent technologies.
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