The Burrill Report

Three San Francisco-based biotech companies attracted significant initial venture capital in the first days of 2013 to advance their programs, with two of them backed by VenBio and one receiving a significant investment from Troika Venture Capital, an international VC based in Moscow.

Labrys Biologics completed a $31 million series A financing from VenBio, Canaan Partners, InterWest Partners, and Sofinnova Ventures. With the financing, Labrys named Steven James president and CEO. He most recently served as CEO of KAI Pharmaceuticals. After closing the financings, Labrys acquired exclusive worldwide rights to RN-307 from Pfizer. The drug is a monoclonal antibody that binds to calcitonin gene-related peptide, a validated target in migraines, and is ready for a mid-stage study. The drug was originally developed by Rinat Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Pfizer in 2006.

“RN-307 is an ideal candidate for a prophylactic drug for chronic migraine that is capable of reducing both frequency and severity of migraines without debilitating side effects,” says Corey Goodman, Chairman, founder of Labrys, and a managing director at venBio, which led the financing.

Goodman should be very familiar with Rinat’s assets. Through his brief tenure at Pfizer as head of its Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center in San Francisco, he worked to establish an entrepreneurial relationship with the area’s academic, biotech, and venture capital community focused around Rinat’s neuroscience research and development. The center never really got off the ground, and after Pfizer acquired Wyeth in January 2009, Goodman left the company and Pfizer decided to maintain its R&D facilities at Rinat’s South San Francisco facility.

Solstice Biologics, a company focused on solving the problem of targeting and delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics, is also backed by VenBio along with Aeris Capital. The biotech completed an $18 million series A financing and acquired an exclusive license to University of California, San Diego intellectual property covering technology that enables RNA molecules to cross membranes of multiple cell types, a problem that has been a bottleneck in delivering on the therapeutic potential of RNA interference microRNA.

Less than 10 percent of the human genome is accessible to current drug discovery technologies, according to Soltice. RNAi offers the promise of accessing the remaining 90 percent or more of the human genome, but drug developers have struggled to get RNA molecules across cell membranes. Steven Dowdy, professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a co-founder of Soltice, and his colleagues have invented a small, cell-permeable RNAi pro-drug that can enter many different cell types, which they hope will solve this problem. Soltice will use the initial funding to develop cell-permeable pro-drugs for a wide range of diseases.

StemPar Sciences received an undisclosed initial investment from Troika Venture Capital, which has also committed to participate in future financings of the startup. StemPar is focused on cancer metabolism and is developing a pipeline of first-in-class cancer drugs that attack solid tumors by simultaneously disrupting their source of energy and defensive ability to hijack the body's DNA-repair mechanism to regenerate when under assault. StemPar’s lead drug targets NQO1, which is found at high levels in pancreatic, breast and lung cancers. The company is also developing companion diagnostic tests to detect the NQO1 target protein with the aim of significantly improving the ability to determine which patients are most likely to respond to this therapy because of their specific genetic makeup.

StemPar co-founder and CEO Barry Sherman was most recently at BiPar Sciences, which was acquired by Sanofi. He was also Genentech’s first chief medical officer where he took part in the development of Herceptin and Rituxan and helped build the company.

Troika Venture Capital invests across multiple industries including information technology, semiconductors and life science sectors from seed stage through series B.

“We think that StemPar has great potential to advance cancer care,” says Artyom Yukhin, managing director at Troika. “Because of the dislocation that the U.S. venture capital industry is currently going through, we see an interesting opportunity to match global pools of investment capital with exciting technologies like StemPar.”



January 03, 2013
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-san_francisco_adds_three_biotech_startups_in_new_year_.html