Featured companies: Biolipox, Inflazyme, Upfront Chromatography, Vertebron00
[NOTE: This is a catchup daily briefing posted on 9/27/07. I've adjusted the posting's timestamp to maintain the chronological order of briefings. --D.P.H.]
Sweden’s Biolipox pays up to $11M for Inflazyme assets — Venture-backed Biolipox, a Swedish biotech focused on inflammatory disease, agreed to pay up to $11 million for the majority of assets controlled by Inflazyme Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded biotech in British Columbia, Canada. Biolipox will pay $4 million up front, with the remaining $7 million contingent on a variety of developmental milestones. With a certain degree of understatement, Inflazyme said it’s possible that it may no longer be publicly listed once the transaction closes.
Biolipox will gain access to two experimental drugs, one for asthma and another with potential for treating memory disorders, as well as a variety of other technologies. The company is considering an IPO, possibly within the next year, Biolipox CEO Torbjorn Bjerke told VentureWire (subscription required).
Upfront Chromatography raises €6.8M for biotech-related purification — Upfront Chromatography, a Danish biotech tools maker focused on purification processes using protein chromatography, pulled in €6.8 million ($9.6 million) in a new funding round. Investors included DSM Venturing, InnovationsKapital and NBGI Ventures.
From the company’s release:
Over the last decade, Upfront has developed a proprietary technology platform, Rhobust™, that purifies biopharmaceuticals and functional proteins directly from complex media. The Company has built a strong reputation as the leading provider of separation services for isolation of high-value functional proteins, from industrial process streams, and is currently developing the world’s largest industrial chromatography installation.
Rhobust technology has also been shown to be particularly suitable for bioprocessing, enabling efficient commercial-scale recovery and purification of monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and other biomolecules direct from blood plasma or bioreactors. The tremendous potential of Upfront’s single use adsorption systems will contribute to DSM’s downstream processing solutions for monoclonal antibodies and other biopharmaceutical proteins.
Spinal-implant maker Vertebron names Paul Sendro as CEO — Stratford, Conn.-based Vertebron, a maker of spinal impants, named Paul Sendro as its new CEO. Sendro was most recently at Blackstone Medical, another spinal-device company that was acquired last year by Orthofix.
