Singapore, April 8 -- Australia-based Starpharma has entered into a strategic partnership with UK headquartered Medicxi, a leading life sciences investment firm dedicated to financing companies developing innovative medicines, to co-found a new UK-based company called Petalion Therapeutics.

Petalion will initially focus on developing novel targeted dendrimer-drug conjugate therapies in oncology, utilising Starpharma's proprietary DEP dendrimer platform technology.

Medicxi will fund Petalion with an initial investment of up to $25 million (~AUD $38 million) to finance the development of a novel oncology drug candidate. Starpharma will license certain intellectual property to Petalion as required for the research, development, manufacture...