SHARK tales are common at this time of year, but rarely in the investment sphere.
That makes a move by Perth-based Yuuwa Capital to take an undisclosed stake in Victorian biotech play AdAlta all the more novel.
It is Yuuwa’s third investment in less than a year and was part of a fund raising effort that included existing AdAlta shareholders and two angel investor groups.
AdAlta said its scientists had used the immune system of sharks and their human-based analogues to generate antibody libraries of more than 8 billion compounds to be applied in the fight against diseases such as cancer.
AdAlta said it had developed i-bodies which had similar properties to shark antibodies but the body was less likely to reject them with its own immune system because they were based on a human protein.
In September, Yuuwa invested $1.5 million in fledging agricultural IT company Agworld, which provides farms with a simple data capture service.
That was just five months after the fund’s first investment from its fund, with up to $1.5 million committed to video analytic software that can monitor movement and train itself to identify unusual behaviour.
Based at Technology Park, Bentley, Yuuwa is a $40 million fund, half of which was committed by the federal government in 2008.