VentureBeat

Alder Biopharmaceuticals, a Bothell, Wash., developer of antibody drugs, raised $40 million in a third funding round. Investors included Delphi Ventures, TPG Biotech, Sevin Rosen Funds, Ventures West, H.I.G. Ventures, and WRF Capital.

Alder develops antibody-based drugs for inflammation and autoimmune disease. The company’s lead candidate, ALD518, is currently in clinical trials as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer, although neither Alder’s Web site nor its statement disclose when the drug began human tests.

Alder’s work is also noticeable because it produces its antibodies in genetically modified yeast cells, a new manufacturing technique that the company claims is faster and cheaper than traditional genetic-engineering methods involving mammalian cells. Not only does production in yeast allow companies to sidestep the need for expensive patent licenses that cover traditional methods, Alder claims it can speed the development process to months from years, making it possible to evaluate a much wider range of antibody candidates.

Alder also claims that ALD518 is the first full-length functioning antibody to be made on an industrial scale in yeast. For an additional information on the merits of yeast-based antibody manufacture, see our previous coverage of Adimab, a startup developing its own yeast-production system for similar reasons. If you’re a technical-detail junkie, don’t miss the discussion in comments.

At a first glance, San Francisco’s Nuon Therapeutics looks like any other specialty-pharmaceutical company that aims to pick up cast-off or failed drugs and try to squeeze some new life out of them. That sort of business model is frequently dull as dishwater, however lucrative it may turn out to be for the investors involved.

Unlike many specialty pharmas, however, Nuon — a recently renamed biotech transplant from Australia that just raised $5 million in a first round of funding — may actually have something scientifically interesting going on. The company, founded in 2002 as Angiogen Pharmaceuticals, does aims to find new uses for marketed drugs. But its first candidate, an old drug called tranilast that Nuon hopes to develop as a new kind of treatment for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, has a fascinating history that serves to illustrate how some older drugs might really provide unexpected medical benefit to large numbers of people.

Tranilast is one of those also-rans of the pharmaceutical world, notable mostly because a small Japanese pharmaceutical company sells it in Japan and South Korea as an asthma treatment. Several years ago, a unit of what later became GlaxoSmithKline tested the drug in a trial involving more than 11,000 patients, based on early evidence that it might prevent restenosis — the scar tissue that can re-block an artery after doctors wedge it open using balloon angioplasty or stents. Yet the trial failed earlier this decade, and tranilast slipped back into obscurity.

Until 2005, that is, when a team of Stanford researchers demonstrated that the drug could reverse paralysis in mice with a simulated form of multiple sclerosis. Tranilast, it turns out, bears a strong resemblance to a derivative of tryptophan — an amino acid found in turkey that was briefly (and wrongly) thought to encourage post-Thanksgiving sleepiness. These tryptophan relatives, however, did seem to have interesting effects on the immune system, which led a German postdoctoral student with funding from Angiogen to contact Stanford MS expert Lawrence Steinman and suggest that they test tranilast and other tryptophan derivatives against the disease in mice.

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