With $1.3M in Seed Funding, Arcturus Adds to RNAi Hub in San Diego

San Diego-based Arcturus Therapeutics, a startup founded earlier this year to develop new drugs based on RNA interference (RNAi) technology, says it has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from multiple individual investors in the United States and Canada.

The startup, founded by pharmaceutical scientists and former Nitto Denko executives Joseph Payne and Pad Chivukula, began operating several months ago in the Janssen Labs incubator carved out of J&J’s Janssen Research & Development facility in San Diego headquarters. They have worked to develop drugs for such companies as DuPont Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Kalypsys.

Arcturus is the fifth RNAi specialist to establish operations in the San Diego area. “It’s kind of turning into a hub for this kind of technology,” says Payne, the Arcturus CEO.

Japan’s Nitto Denko established a technical subsidiary in Oceanside, CA, in 2000 with an R&D focus that included drug delivery, gene delivery, and related technologies for nucleic acid synthesis. In early January, San Francisco-based venBio and Switzerland’s Aeris Capital AG provided $18 million in Series A funding to Solstice Biologics, which established its research and development team in San Diego to develop RNAi technology licensed from U.C. San Diego. RNA specialist Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ISIS]]), with 28 antisense drugs in its pipeline, was founded in Carlsbad, CA, in 1989. Regulus Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RGLS]]) was spun out by Isis and Cambridge, MA-based Alkermes Pharmaceuticals in 2007 to develop microRNA therapeutics.

The global market for RNAi drugs is expected to exceed $4 billion by 2017, according to a report from Global Industry Analysts. Scientists have been evaluating interference RNA molecules as a way to block the production of malicious proteins by mutated genes, using different types of RNA molecules and testing a variety of delivery mechanisms to get RNA drugs through the protective cellular barrier.

Payne was a group leader and senior manager when Japan’s Nitto Denko entered

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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.