San Diego’s ReVision Therapeutics, Founded in April, Takes on Development of Drug Candidate for Age-Related Blindness

A San Diego biopharmaceutical startup, formed just five months ago to resume development of a compound for treating age-related macular degeneration, has reported encouraging results from a two-year, mid-stage clinical trial of the compound, known as fenretinide.

The findings were released in Florida yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Retinal Specialists and in San Diego today by ReVision Therapeutics, the biotech started in April with venture funding led by Avalon Ventures, which was joined by Advent Healthcare, Aisling Capital, Atlas Capital, Investor Growth Capital, and Novaquest. (The biopharmaceutical startup is not to be confused with Rhevision Technology, another San Diego startup with a similar name that is developing miniature tunable camera lenses for mobile phone handsets.)

Avalon’s Jay Lichter declined to say this afternoon how much capital ReVision has raised to acquire fenretinide and to restart development of the drug in San Diego. He would only say that ReVision now has ample resources to analyze the data accumulated on fenretinide so far—and to continue development of the drug as a treatment for macular degeneration, a chronic deterioration of the central portion of the retina. The age-related condition is a leading cause of blindness in people 60 and older, and affects some 1.8 million Americans, according to the National Eye Institute.

The deal to acquire the compound and start ReVision means fenretinide has come full circle. It was initially under development as a potential treatment for macular degeneration by Sytera, a San Diego-based company founded in 2004. But development of the drug moved to Tampa, FL-based Sirion Therapeutics, an ophthalmic-focused biopharmaceutical that acquired fenretinide through its 2006 merger with Sytera. Sirion conducted the mid-stage clinical trials at a number of sites throughout Florida, and Lichter says the last patient left the trial in April.

Sytera was founded to develop fenretinide by Kevin Kinsella, the founder of San Diego-based Avalon Ventures, and Ken Widder (now with Latterell Venture Partners of San Francisco), with help from Avalon’s Lichter, Nathan Mata, and Gabriel Travis, a professor of biochemistry at UCLA. Kinsella, who was on Sirion’s board, and Lichter led

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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.