San Diego’s Cylene Pharmaceuticals says it has raised an additional $12 million from its existing venture investors to help fund its early stage trial of an oral drug for multiple myeloma.
The company says investors include Sanderling Ventures, HBM BioVentures (Cayman), Novartis BioVenture Fund, BioVentures Investors, Lilly Ventures, Mitsui & Co., and Morningside Venture Investments. VentureWire reports the funding is an extension of a $44 million Series C round that Cylene raised in 2007 to move another anti-cancer drug through Phase II trials.
In the process, Cylene identified CX-4945, a compound that inhibits CK2, an enzyme involved in multiple myeloma and other cancers. The company, which has raised $77 million since 2001, says the multi-center Phase I study with CX-4945 will be conducted in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.
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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