Opsona Therapeutics has secured €33 million to fund the further development of a drug it hopes will tackle organ rejection in kidney transplant patients.

The funding, which was oversubscribed, is understood to be among the largest venture capital investments in life sciences worldwide in then past year.

The money will finance a Phase II clinical study to assess the safety, efficacy and tolerability of Opsona’s lead drug, OPN-305, in kidney transplant patients who are at high risk of delayed graft function - a form of post-transplant renal failure that can have very serious effect on patients.

The company, founded in 2004 as a spin-out from Trinity College Dublin, has already tested the drug's safety in healthy patients.

OPN-305 works by inhibiting Toll-like Receptor 2 – a protein in the body designed to reject foreign organisms, such as a kidney transplanted form another person.

The company says renal transplant is only the initial target for OPN-305 which it sees as having uses in addressing the inflammatory response in various diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, lupus, nephritis, various cancers and ischemia/reperfusion injuries.

The funding round was led by existing investor Novartis Venture Fund and incoming investor BB Biotech Ventures. Other existing investors Fountain Healthcare Partners, Roche Venture Fund and Seroba Kernel Life Sciences were involved in the latest funding round alongside new entrants Sunstone Capital, Baxter Ventures, Amgen Ventures, and EMBL Ventures.

Representative from BB Biotech Ventures, Sunstone Capital and Baxter Ventures will join the board of directors.