VentureBeat

Featured companies: Acceleron Pharma, AdvanDx, Altheus Therapeutics, BiPar Sciences, Coventina Healthcare Enterprises, ForteBio, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, Mako Surgical, Nile Therapeutics, Novate Medical

[NOTE: This briefing was posted on Friday, 9/21/07; I've edited its timestamp to preserve chronological order among the briefings.]

Nile Therapeutics raises $20M, goes public in reverse merger — Berkeley, Calif.-based Nile Therapeutics, a developer of cardiovascular drugs, raised $20 million from new and existing investors and carried out a reverse merger that takes the company public. Investors in the financing included Wexford Capital, RIT Capital Partners, Life Science Capital Master Fund, and other institutional investors. It’s not clear if Nile had raised venture capital prior to this funding.

Nile is at work on a second generation “natriuretic peptide,” which is basically a protein fragment that mimics the function of natural diuretics found in the heart. Nile licensed that drug from the Mayo Clinic; it’s now in early-stage human testing. Nile intends to acquire additional experimental drugs to expand its portfolio.

AdvanDx pulls in $15M for pathogen diagnostics — AdvanDx, a Woburn, Mass., biotech that develops molecular diagnostic tests for identifying infectious pathogens in hospitals, raised $15 million in a third funding round. Investors included bioMérieux, LD Pensions and SLS Venture.

The company’s diagnostic tests can supposedly identify the microbes responsible for bloodstream infections in hours rather than days, as current culturing tests require. The time saved can make it possible to effectively treat patients much sooner. In that sense, AdvanDx’s technology is similar to that of OpGen, which we wrote about in the first item here.

Novate Medical draws in €4M for anti-clot device — Ireland’s Novate Medical, a device maker at work on filters that can be installed in veins to prevent blood clots from reaching the lungs and causing pulmonary embolisms, raised €4 million ($5.5 million). Investors included ACT Venture Capital, Seroba BioVentures and Enterprise Ireland.

The company doesn’t appear to have a Web site.

Antibody company Ganymed adds €3.5M to round — Germany’s Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, a developer of monoclonal-antibody drugs for cancer, added €3.5 million ($4.9 million) to its third funding round, bringing that total to €37.2 million ($52.1 million). The additional funding was provided by ATS Beteiligungsverwaltung of Munich.

Altheus Therapeutics gets $3.6 million against bowel disease — Oklahoma City’s Altheus Therapeutics, a biotech working on new treatments for inflammatory bowel disease, raised $3.6 million to fund clinical trials. St. Louis-based Prolog Ventures, the Oklahoma Seed Capital Fund and Oklahoma Equity Partners provided the funding.

Altheus is developing a treatment that combines two existing drugs, which the company hasn’t identified.

Coventina Healthcare Enterprises gets $150K, moves to Pennsylvania — The seemingly ubiquitous Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse has struck again, investing $150,000 in Coventina Healthcare Enterprises, which then relocated to southwestern Pennsylvania from Texas. Coventina recently acquired the assets of Texas-based Selicor, and now develops therapeutic heating systems that rely on radio-frequency energy.

Mako Surgical seeks an $86M IPO for knee-surgery robots — The Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., company filed to raise up to $86 million in an initial offering. Mako’s robotic-surgery device and knee implants are designed to perform minimally invasive knee operations.

Brownian motion: Personnel moves in the life sciences —

• Acceleron Pharma, of Cambridge, Mass., named John Knopf as CEO. The company develops biotech drugs for muscle and bone injuries.
• BiPar Sciences, of Brisbane, Calif., named former Genentech CEO G. Kirk Raab as its acting chief executive. Raab is also the company’s chairman. The company develops cancer drugs.
• ForteBio, of Menlo Park, Calif., named Joseph Keegan as its new CEO. The company builds instruments designed to speed the discovery of new therapeutics.

KaloBios, a Palo Alto, Calif., biotech antibody-therapeutic company, raised $20 million in a third funding round. The company is developing new drugs based on monoclonal antibodies, which target specific cells or proteins in the body. Its lead candidate, an antibody against granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor, or GM-CSF — a protein that helps regulate the white-blood-cell immune response — is intended to treat a variety of immune-related diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.

Lehman Brothers led the round, joined by MPM Capital, Sofinnova Ventures, Alloy Ventures, 5AM Ventures, Singapore Bioinnovations, and Lotus BioScience Ventures. The funding will allow KaloBios to support clinical testing of two antibodies and to move a third into human tests.

Adimab, a Lebanon, N.H., biotech startup developing a “platform” for the discovery and commercialization of yeast-derived antibodies, raised $6 million in a first funding round (hat tips to the In Vivo Blog and VentureWire). The company was founded by Darthmouth’s Tillman Gerngross — who co-founded GlycoFi, a biotech acquired by Merck last year for $400 million — and MIT’s Dane Wittrup. Both researchers are chemical engineers with a longstanding interest in protein expression and engineering.

The concept behind Adimab is kind of intriguing, although it’s also complex and limited to solving a particular set of business-process issues — which, when you think about it, is just about what you’d expect a pair of engineers to come up with. The problem, at heart, is that monoclonal antibodies are a pain for many pharmaceutical companies to work with, due to the fact that discovering them and preparing them for use as drugs involves a variety of disparate technologies, many of them owned by a hodgepodge of other companies and institutions. Working out licensing agreements to acquire rights to all these technologies is possible, but still something of a headache.

As I understand it from an interview Gerngross gave to In Vivo, Adimab plans to address this problem by developing its own bottom-up system for discovering new antibodies and moving them along the development process. (The company’s name, which it prefers to capitalize as “ADiMaB,” is a mash-up of several of these development steps: Antibody Discovery, Maturation and Biomanufacturing.) Ideally, this yeast-based “platform” would yield antibodies that aren’t tied down by the web of intellectual property that covers many of today’s antibodies, making a potentially attractive fit for the first Big Pharma company that comes along. In fact, Gerngross seems explicitly mercenary about his intentions, telling In Vivo that “we’re building a business that will service pharma better than anyone else and [one] that could very quickly trigger an acquisition.”

Which is great so far as it goes, I suppose, although it’s hard to get too worked up about a new company when one of the co-founders seems to want it to disappear into some big-company bureaucracy as quickly as possible. The technology behind Adimab, however, is pretty interesting, involving as it seems to fairly recently developed techniques for forcing yeast cells to produce human antibodies (a 2006 Wittrup paper describing this technique of “yeast surface display” is here). Although since this also sounds a lot like what GlycoFi was doing, it will be interesting to see how Adimab’s approach differs.

In addition to the advantages described above, yeast-based production of human antibodies would presumably also be considerably faster and more efficient than current techniques, which generally involve mouse antibodies that require additional “humanizing” so they aren’t eliminated by the immune system when used as drugs. Of course, the technology is still at an early stage, and to the best of my knowledge, no yeast-derived antibody has even been tested in humans as an experimental therapeutic, much less turned into a functioning drug. (As always, if you know otherwise, please let us know in comments.)

Adimab’s first-round investors are SV Life Sciences and Polaris Venture Partners.

Abeome, an Athens, Ga., biotech developing new ways to produce monoclonal antibodies, raised an undisclosed amount of venture funding from Georgia Venture Partners and the ATDC Seed Capital Fund.

Biolex Therapeutics, a Pittsboro, N.C., developer of technology for improving the properties of monoclonal antibodies, raised $30 million in a third funding round.

Biolex specializes in producing proteins that are difficult to make with existing bioengineering processes and in optimizing the biological properties of monoclonal antibodies. It is also pursuing its own experimental drug candidates, and said the proceeds of this round will serve primarily to advance Locteron, an experimental time-release form of interferon alfa, into late-stage human tests against hepatitis C.

Investor Growth Capital led the round, joined by two other new investors, JP Morgan Securities and Easton Capital. Existing shareholders including Quaker BioVentures, Polaris Venture Partners, Intersouth Partners, Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation and Dow Venture Capital also participated. The company’s release is here (PDF).