Ljungström family office co-led AnaCardio's €62.5m Series B with Novo Holdings
Two days earlier the office joined Breye Therapeutics' €67.5m Series A as a new investor, and Novo Holdings was in both rounds.
At a glance
The Ljungström family office co-led a €62.5 million Series B for AnaCardio AB alongside Novo Holdings, and two days earlier it joined Breye Therapeutics' €67.5 million Series A as a new investor.
The Series B fully funds GOAL-HF2, a Phase 2b trial expected to enrol about 400 patients at roughly 100 sites in twelve countries.
Mission BioCapital and Novo Holdings co-led the Breye round, which takes danegaptide, described as a first-in-class oral small molecule for non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy, into a randomised Phase 2 trial starting in 2027.
The Ljungström family office co-led a €62.5 million Series B for AnaCardio AB alongside Novo Holdings, and two days earlier it joined Breye Therapeutics' €67.5 million Series A as a new investor. Family Office Hub reported both commitments. Novo Holdings took part in both rounds, which together total €130 million. The report does not break out the family office's individual commitment sizes, and it says one of the two came with a board seat attached, without saying which.
The Series B fully funds GOAL-HF2, a Phase 2b trial expected to enrol about 400 patients at roughly 100 sites in twelve countries. First enrolment is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a Phase 3-ready asset targeted for 2028. AnaCardio is a privately held, Solna-based clinical-stage company built on research from the Karolinska Institutet by Lars H. Lund. Its lead asset, AC01, works through the ghrelin signalling pathway to make heart muscle contract harder, which the report says avoids the side effects that sank earlier contractility drugs: no racing heart, no arrhythmia, no ischemia and no drop in blood pressure.
The GOAL-HF1 results behind the Series B
In GOAL-HF1, the earlier trial, cardiac output in the 3 mg group rose 22% from baseline at day 28, and ejection fraction gained 4.8 percentage points against 1.6 points for placebo. That trial ran 58 patients across 14 sites, and the results were presented in May 2026 and published in The Lancet in June.
Breye's oral candidate for diabetic retinopathy
Mission BioCapital and Novo Holdings co-led the Breye round, which takes danegaptide, described as a first-in-class oral small molecule for non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy, into a randomised Phase 2 trial starting in 2027. Breye Therapeutics ApS is based in Hørsholm in Denmark and is developing orally administered drugs for eye disease. Roughly 130 million people worldwide have the condition, and treatment today, where it exists, is by injection into the eye.
Family Office Hub frames the pair of commitments as unusual for a family office: cheques of that size inside one week in clinical-stage biotech, it notes, are the kind of activity that usually belongs to a dedicated life science fund. The report's argument is that Nordic family offices have a long record in industrial holdings and a shorter one in life science, and that writing both cheques alongside Novo Holdings rather than leading alone is how family capital gets exposure to a sector it cannot diligence unaided, with a board seat as the mechanism for staying informed afterwards.
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