VentureBeat

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 at least $6.5 million.

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 Institute for Human Virology in Baltimore: Robert Gallo, William Blattner and Robert Redfield.