San Diego-based Sangart, a biopharmaceutical company developing artificial blood products based on human hemoglobin, says it has raised $50 million in funding that completes its Series F round.
Sangart says the $50 million was raised when its investors exercised warrants the company had issued in 2007 as part of its Series F round, and bring total funding collected in that round to about $100 million. The company plans to use the proceeds to fund continued clinical development of its products, which are based on a molecule Sangart calls MP4.
MP4 is an oxygen-carrying molecule that Sangart makes by chemically modifying human hemoglobin purified from outdated donated blood. Late-stage clinical trials of MP4 in orthopedic surgery patients completed last year didn’t show the oxygen carrier improved clinical outcomes for those patients, so the company is pursuing other indications for the molecule under guidance from its scientific advisory board.
Sangart was founded in 1998 to commercialize research conducted at the Letterman Army Institute of Research and U.C. San Diego. Sangart’s founder, UCSD professor of medicine Robert M. Winslow, died on Feb. 2 after battling brain cancer. Winslow served as Sangart’s president, CEO and chief medical officer until June 2008 and as chairman until December.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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