incentives to encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop cures for rare diseases. In the case of sickle cell anemia, about 70,000 Americans are affected by the disease, and between 40,000 and 50,000 in Europe.
Roughly $165 million has been invested in Sangart through six rounds to get it this far, O’Callaghan said, with most of the funding coming from New York’s Leucadia National (NYSE: [[ticker:LUK]]), a diversified holding company. The rest has come from about 100 mostly individual investors.
The company has received about $1.3 million under a Cooperative Research And Development Agreement with the U.S. Navy for development of its MP4OX oxygen therapeutic, and O’Callaghan is hopeful the company can get an additional $15 million to $20 million in similar funding from the military.
The Sangart CEO says he also has been traveling, mostly in the U.S. and primarily to meet with potential investors and corporate partners. “A number of companies have been talking to us in relation to their own corporate strategy,” O’Callaghan said. In the meantime, O’Callaghan says Sangart is currently negotiating its Series G round of venture funding. After the next round of clinical trials are completed, he said, “then we would like to look at our options in terms of proceeding to Phase III trials. We want to keep our options open.”
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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