Archive for the ‘Atlas Venture’ Category
May
10
Posted under
Atlas Venture,
Blog,
Bob Radie,
CLS Capital,
Companies,
Diagnostics,
Egalet,
Funding,
Medical Devices,
Medical Supply,
morphine,
pain drugs,
Pharmaceuticals,
R&D,
startup,
Startups,
Universities,
VC,
Videos by rmcbride
Pain med developer Egalet has found a new investor for a second-round financing and hired former Eli Lilly ($LLY) employee Bob Radie as president and CEO. CLS Capital has joined the company's previous investors--Altas Venture, Omega Funds, Sunstone Capital and Index Ventures--and the company raised $14.3 million in a Series B round of financing.
With the influx of capital, the company plans to move ahead with late-stage studies of its lead anti-pain treaments, which include an extended-release formulation of morphine, according to the startup's website. The company has drug-delivery tech that enables opioids and other meds to be delivered gradually and stymie abuse of the drugs.
Radie, the new CEO, previously served as chief executive of Topaz Pharmaceuticals, which a unit of Sanofi ($SNY) scooped up late last year to acquire its anti-lice treatment. His nearly 30-year career in the biopharma industry includes stints at TransMolecular, where he was CEO, Morphoteck, Vicuron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly.
"With the funds raised and Bob's appointment, Egalet is well positioned to move through the final stage of development with its lead abuse-resistant pain programs," Atlas partner Jean-Francois Formela, Egalet's chairman, said in a statement. "With the increase in abuse of pain medications and the increasingly restrictive regulation and oversight of pain medications, there is a growing need for the Egalet's abuse-resistant opioids in development."
- here's the release
May
09
Posted under
Atlas Venture,
Biotech Venture Capital,
Blog,
Companies,
Diagnostics,
Funding,
Medical Devices,
Medical Supply,
Pharmaceuticals,
Pipeline,
PricewaterhouseCoopers,
Startups,
Universities,
VC,
Videos by rmcbride
Life sciences venture investors gambled far less on life sciences startups in the first three months of the year, underscoring a shift toward later-stage deals and concerns about the amount of dollars going into newly hatched drug and device developers.
After reporting last month that first-quarter venture investing in U.S. biotech dropped by 43%, PricewaterhouseCoopers has drilled deeper into the numbers and noted that young life sciences outfits might have fared even worse than more mature startups. Based on data from Thomson Reuters, the firm found that the number of companies to get their first influx of VC money fell by 53%, and dollars invested into deals shrank by 38% in the first quarter compared with the same period last year.
The game of taking the pulse of innovative activity in biotech based on venture numbers can be tricky, as young drug developers have learned to make do with smaller budgets and some outfits choose to stay under the radar and advance programs without a big-bang VC round. There's also plenty of talk about the dearth of big-idea operations getting off the ground nowadays because of the huge expense and risk of supporting such companies.
"I don't get concerned about quarterly variation in dollars and deals," Atlas Venture partner Bruce Booth, who invests in biotech, said in an email. "Overall Life Sciences investments were within 10% of 1Q 2011, and 2011 was one of the strongest four years for [life sciences] venture investing in the past 15 years."
The VC industry as a whole has contracted, yet Booth's analysis shows that the relative interest in backing biotech and device companies hasn't changed. "[Life sciences] remains reasonably steady as a percentage of total venture capital spend: it has been around 25% for most of the last decade and I expect that to continue."
- here's PricewaterhouseCoopers' release
Related Articles:
Biotech venture rounds dwindle in Europe, tracking U.S. trend
Biotech VC deals, dollars shrivel in Q1 as devices see an upturn
The best of times, the worst of times?
Dec
15
Posted under
Atlas Venture,
Biotech Venture Capital,
Blog,
Companies,
Diagnostics,
Funding,
Medical Devices,
Medical Supply,
orphan drug status,
Pharmaceuticals,
rare diseases,
Shire Pharmaceuticals,
Startups,
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Videos by Ryan McBride
Dublin-based Shire's ($SHPGY) Human Genetic Therapies unit and venture capitalists from Atlas Venture have formed a multiyear alliance to hunt for new investments in the ripe field of treating rare diseases, Cambridge, MA-based Atlas revealed Thursday morning.
For their part in the collaboration, Atlas' partners plan to use their years of experience in starting new biotech companies. Shire HGT's scientists, who have a track record of developing rare disease drugs such as the Hunter syndrome med Elaprase, will work with Atlas' partners to evaluate investments and carry out wet lab experiments as part of that process, according to Bruce Booth, a partner at Atlas.
Shire HGT, headquartered in Lexington, MA, and Atlas plan to pool capital to back new rare disease drug developers, and Booth said the potential exists for Shire to gain option-like terms in the investments that would enable the drugmaker to buy a startup for pre-determined sums and roll the new group's drugs into its own rare disease R&D pipeline. "This secures access to these innovations for Shire, while mitigating the downstream liquidity risk for the team and investors," Booth wrote in an email to FierceBiotech.
The deal comes as drugmakers increase their bets on early-stage biotech startups, due to traditional venture capital firms dropping out of the biotech game because of the financial challenges of supporting capital-intensive drug development. Shire HGT, unlike Pfizer ($PFE), Novartis ($NVS), and GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK), doesn't have a dedicated venture group, but now it can tap some of the expertise in this area with Atlas, which has a similar collaboration with agricultural biotech giant Monsanto ($MON).
"As a leader in rare diseases, this partnership is another way for Shire to ensure that we expand into new disease areas and continue to apply cutting edge technologies in this space," said Philip Vickers, senior VP of R&D at Shire, in a statement. "Working with an organization like Atlas provides us with a new source of external expertise that is complementary to our internal capabilities and has a clear focus on Shire's goal of bringing innovative therapies to patients suffering from rare diseases worldwide."
There's a glut of opportunities to create new rare disease medicines. About 25 million Americans are estimated to suffer from inherited diseases, and less than half of the more than 6,000 rare diseases have a known genetic cause, according to the NIH. Also, companies like Genzyme and Shire HGT have been able to charge relatively huge sums of $200,000 and up for their rare-disease drugs. And the FDA extends the market exclusivity of rare or orphan disease drugs as an incentive to companies to develop such treatments.
- here's Altas' release
- check out Booth's blog post
Related Articles:
Study: Orphan drugs win favored status in FDA reviews
Shire battles back to win FDA OK for HAE drug Firazyr
Shire in the hunt for promising new stem cell tech