Sophiris Moves to Unlock Blockbuster Potential in New Prostate Drug

recruit experienced drug developers to Vancouver. The board decided to make a fresh start, with a new management team and a new round of funding.

So far, the company has raised a total of roughly $55 million from investors, according to a spokesman for Sophiris. Before 2010, the company (which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange) was funded through a series of small private placement transactions arranged with Canadian investors. In this way, B.C. Advantage Funds, a venture capital business in British Columbia, acquired a “significant” stake in the company.

Sophiris’s re-start officially began in September, 2010, when Protox entered into an investment agreement with Warburg Pincus, the global private equity firm, in which Warburg agreed to invest as much as $34.4 million (CND $35 million) in the company. Of the total, Warburg has invested $27.5 million (CND $28 million) so far.

“The reason I took on this job was that I had spearheaded the due diligence team for Warburg, and I found that this has an absolutely unique asset with a very attractive mechanism for action,” says Ekman. Sofinnova did not participate in the round, but might if the opportunity arises. “Warburg had a chance to do this deal, and they needed to do it fast, so they took the whole deal,” he explains.

Under Ekman, the company also relocated in San Diego, where he says there is an abundance of experienced drug developers. “The current team [about 11 employees and twice as many consultants] has 20 drug approvals under their belt,” he says. In April, the company changed its name to Sophiris Bio, and began trading in Toronto under the new ticker symbol SHS.

Sophiris describes its experimental compound, PRX 302, as a recombinant form of the proaerolysin protein, a large molecule with a specialized group of molecules at one end known as a carboxyl terminus. The carboxyl group acts like a lock that inhibits the

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

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.