REPAIR Impact Fund
After 5 years of operation, the Novo Holdings REPAIR Impact Fund has invested close to 50% of the committed capital. Two projects out of ten have demonstrated clinical proof of concept so far. Moving forward, the Fund will focus the remaining capital on supporting the existing portfolio and on closing the final investments from the 2022 call for proposals.
Novo Holdings established the REPAIR Impact Fund commissioned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation in February 2018 with a total budget of USD 165 million to invest in companies involved in discovery and early-stage development of therapies targeting resistant microorganisms, hence the acronym: Replenishing and Enabling the Pipeline for Anti-Infective Resistance.
The Fund has received and reviewed more than 300 proposals over the last 5 years and invested in 10 companies. In addition, the fund is expecting to make two more investments as part of the 2022 call for proposals.
The primary goal for the REPAIR Impact Fund is to advance innovative anti-infective programs through phase 1 clinical proof of concept studies. Two programs, from Minervax ApS and Spero Therapeutics respectively, have achieved this goal already. With the remaining capital, we hope to advance more projects from our portfolio to this stage and beyond. As is typical for closed-end funds, about half of the capital is kept in reserve for supporting follow-on investments in the existing portfolio companies. Therefore, we will not open a new call for proposals in 2023.
Investing into new anti-microbial and anti-infective projects is difficult, so to ensure that our existing portfolio companies are able to advance their activities, we’d like to focus our capital reserves on supporting them in a time where finding new investment partners is a challenge.
Novo Holdings and the Novo Nordisk Foundation remain committed to combatting antimicrobial resistance, a critical global challenge and area of strategic focus. Our USD 50 million commitment to the AMR Action Fund remains, and we will look for additional mechanisms of supporting the fight against AMR. Several initiatives are currently being developed and will be announced later in 2023.
We are confident that the direction we have set for the REPAIR Impact Fund will serve our portfolio companies better, and ultimately be for the benefit of patients, when new innovative products hopefully reach the broader market.