almost $40 million to ViaCyte to help accelerate development of ViaCyte’s technology. The Phase I/II clinical trial will involve four to six testing sites, including UC San Diego.
—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SGEN]]) of Bothell, WA, has inked a deal with Danish antibody firm Genmab to combine efforts and create antibody-drug conjugates to fight cancer. Genmab will pay Seattle Genetics $11 million upfront and more than $200 million in milestones as Genmab advances products stemming from the collaboration. Genmab will use Seattle Genetics’s auristatin small molecules—toxic drugs that kill tumor cells—in combination with its own antibody carriers that target AXL, a protein associated with several types of cancers.
—After closing on $6.85 million in Series B funding at the beginning of the year, San Diego-based Avelas Biosciences said it raised $550,000 more to advance its lead product toward a first-in-human study. Founded five years ago, Avelas has been developing a cell-penetrating biological agent that turns fluorescent in the presence of tumors and cancer cells. The company says it is intended to help surgeons differentiate between healthy cells and cancerous tissue during breast cancer surgery.
—Zephyrus Biosciences of Berkeley, CA, announced Wednesday it has raised $1.86 million in seed funding and grants to develop the single-cell diagnostic technology it spun out of the University of California, Berkeley lab of Amy Herr. The seed funding was led by the Bay Area’s Life Science Angels network and includes Mission Bay Capital, The Angel Forum, and the Stanford-StartX Fund. The firm also received a $350,000 SBIR Phase 1 grant from the National Institutes of Health and $10,000 from a UC-affiliated fellowship program. Zephyrus aims to take “Western blot” analysis of proteins in tissue samples and apply it to individual cells.
—The FDA approved NephroCheck, a biomarker-based diagnostic test developed by San Diego-based Astute Medical for assessing the risk of critically ill patients developing acute kidney injury (AKI) while hospitalized. The lab test detects the presence of certain proteins in urine samples, and can generate results in 20 minutes. The results represent the likelihood a patient will develop AKI over the next 12 hours.
—MediciNova (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MNOV]]), a San Diego biopharmaceutical company, said the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has awarded more than $2.6 million to continue clinical research on the use of its experimental drug, ibudilast, in opioid dependence. The company said the funding went to Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute to help complete a mid-stage clinical trial of ibudilast. The company reported encouraging interim results from the Phase 2 study last month.
Xconomy San Diego Editor Bruce V. Bigelow contributed to this report.
