two monoclonal antibodies under development for the treatment of clostridium diffficile infection. The UMass lab and Medarex are also eligible for up to $165 million in additional fees and royalties on any eventual sales.
—Parasol Therapeutics, an MIT spinoff out to develop new treatments and tests for influenza, raised $3.25 million in a seed round of venture capital from Polaris Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, Lux Capital, and others. Ryan has a nice profile of the startup, whose co-founders include MIT’s Ram Sasisekharan and Polaris general partner Alan Crane. Sasisekharan and Crane also co-founded Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:[[ticker:MNTA]]) and Cerulean Pharma (formerly Tempo Pharmaceuticals), both of Cambridge, MA.
—Waltham, MA-based Phase Forward (NASDAQ:[[ticker:PFWD]]), a maker of software for drug-safety and clinical-trials applications, acquired Cambridge, MA-based Waban Software for $14 million in cash.
—E-commerce startup DemandWare of Woburn, MA-based reportedly raised $15 million in a Series D funding round from North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
—A group of lenders led by Royal Bank of Scotland and including Banco Espirito Santo, Banco Santander, BNP Paribas, CoBank, HSH Nordbank, KeyBank, Société Générale and Credit Suisse put up $376 million to help Boston-based First Wind build a 97-turbine wind farm in Milford, UT.
—Lexington, MA-based NitroMed (NASDAQ:[[ticker:NTMD]]) inked a deal worth $2.6 million up front and up to $5.2 million in future payments to sell and license its nitric oxide-based technology to the French firm NicOx.
—Portsmouth, NH-based Powerspan announced it had closed a new $50 million financing round led by new investors George Soros, Tenaska Energy, AllianceBernstein, and Persimmon Tree Capital, and joined by NGEN Partners, The Beacon Group, The Tremont Group, RockPort Capital Partners, Calvert, Angeleno Group, Fluor Corporation, and FirstEnergy. Powerspan is developing systems for removing pollutants from flue gas at coal-fired electrical plants.
—Cambridge, MA-based Stemgent teamed with San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics to launch the fee-based Catalyst program, which will give large pharmaceutical companies, big biotech firms, and academic labs access to the companies’ induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology for research purposes.
