Life sciences briefing: Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007
Featured companies: AngioScore, Forsight Labs, Genoptix, Metastatix, Optherion, QLT
UPDATED: See below.
Artery opener AngioScore pulls in $30M — AngioScore, a Fremont, Calif., maker of balloon catheters used to open up clogged arteries, raised $30 million in a fifth funding round. Investors included Telegraph Hill Partners, Psilos Group Management, QuestMark Partners, L.P., UV Partners, California Technology Ventures and Innomed Ventures.
AngioScore’s balloon catheters, which inflate inside blocked blood vessels to restore blood flow, are designed to overcome problems that sometimes… Continue Reading
Personalized medicine takes a (tiny) step forward
(UPDATED: See below.)
For at least a decade, biotech futurists have been predicting that the genomics revolution will lead to medical treatments tailored to the genetic quirks of individuals. And for at least as long, we’ve all been waiting for evidence that this “personalized medicine” revolution is coming to pass.
On Monday, the field took a baby step forward when the FDA approved Selzentry, a new AIDS drug from Pfizer. Selzentry is unique in a number of ways… Continue Reading
Profectus Bio wins $200K grant for HIV therapies
Baltimore, Md.-based Profectus BioSciences, a biotech developing new strategies to attack HIV, received a $200,000 small-business innovation grant from the National Institutes of Health to improve the effectiveness of anti-HIV antibodies. Last month, the company received a similar $300,000 grant (PDF link), just a few days after the company raised $3 million in a private placement.
Profectus, which was spun out of the Institute for Human Virology in 2005, has so far rased a total of… Continue Reading
Koronis: Mutating HIV into extinction
(UPDATED: See below.)
Seattle’s Koronis Pharmaceuticals, a biotech focused on antiviral drugs that cleverly attempt to to drive viruses into extinction, got some serious validation yesterday when it raised $20 million to fund a mid-stage “proof of principle” trial for its leading AIDS drug.
Koronis, which was founded in 1998 to commercialize the pioneering viral research of Larry Loeb, Jim Mullins and John Essigmann, is pursuing a novel and unusual path to defeating viral disease. Most antiviral drugs… Continue Reading
Profectus Bio pulls in $3M for antiviral drugs
Profectus BioSciences, a Baltimore, Md., developer of antiviral drugs and vaccines targeting HIV, raised $3 million in a private placement. Private investors, including Cross Atlantic Capital Partners and board member Stewart Greenebaum, contributed.
Profectus is developing ways to combine AIDS drugs with “immune modulators” that would render HIV more vulnerable to antiviral attack, and is also at work on an AIDS vaccine. The company was founded in 2003 by three eminent virologists who also co-founded the… Continue Reading
Reader feedback: Cheap drugs for poor nations, the art of the drug deal
I’m at work on a longer post that hasn’t yet come together, so I thought I’d pull an old dodge favored by daily newspaper columnists and respond to some reader comments instead. Fortunately for me, both comments left here in the past day or so have been thought-provoking — maybe there’s hope for the Internet after all.
With respect to the tussle over patents and drug pricing in Thailand, Gal Josefsberg wrote:
I’m not sure how they expect… Continue Reading