San Diego-based Celladon, which raised $43 million in February to advance development of a gene therapy treatment for heart disease, has extended the round with an additional $10 million, according to a statement yesterday. The company’s lead drug candidate is intended to restore a key enzyme for a healthy heart.
The extension added two new investors, MPM Capital and LSP Life Sciences Partners, to a group of new and existing investors that includes Lundbeckfond Ventures, Novartis Venture Funds, Hambrecht and Quist Capital Management, Pfizer Venture Investors, GBS Venture Partners, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development, and Venrock. As part of the deal, MPM Capital’s Todd Foley and LSP’s Fouad Azzam are joining Celladon’s board.
The company also plans to establish a subsidiary in The Netherlands to manage its European activities.
The funding raised by Celladon this year tops more than $61 million invested in the startup before 2012. Celladon was founded in 2004.
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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