Novocell: With diabetes study pending, investors pony up another $25M
Novocell, a San Diego embryonic stem-cell company, raised $25 million in a third round of funding. That’s presumably a bit of a letdown for the company, which had previously hoped to pull in as much as $35 million in the round. I wrote earlier about Novocell’s fundraising here.
The round was led by Johnson & Johnson Development, the venture arm of J&J itself, joined by Sanderling Ventures, Asset Management Company and Pacific Horizon Ventures.
In my… 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