Fresh Off Amira Success, Versant’s Bolzon and San Diego’s Prasit Begin Anew with Inception

Last year’s blockbuster film “Inception,” was about a dream within a dream within a dream, which made it a little hard to follow.

Likewise with “Inception,” the San Diego life sciences startup that was founded earlier this year by Versant Ventures’ Brad Bolzon and Peppi Prasit, the former co-founder and chief scientific officer at San Diego’s Amira Biosciences. With Inception, the founders apparently have set out to duplicate their success at Amira, which was acquired in July by Bristol-Myers Squibb in a deal valued at $475 million.

But it can get a little hard to follow.

As we reported this summer, “Inception 1” disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had raised $5 million in an initial round of funding that targeted $10 million. At that time, Prasit (who is also a San Diego Xconomist) responded to my request for more details with a short e-mail: “It’s an incubator for ideas right now. I would like to keep it stealth for a little while.”

Now, according to another regulatory filing completed before Thanksgiving, “Inception 2,” a different entity created by Bolzon and Prasit, says it also has raised $5 million of a planned $10 million round.

Versant’s Bolzon told VentureWire reporter Brian Gormley a few months ago that the startup officially known as Inception Sciences is intended to serve as a holding company for spinning out individual drug development programs as separate corporate entities. The idea represents a new life sciences business model that makes it easier for Big Pharma companies to acquire a set of potential drug compounds without the “non-strategic assets” that come with a biotech acquisition.

Hmmmm. Since these would not be conventional M&A deals, would this business model also dispense with the need to involve investment bankers in an acquisition?

Another advantage to Inception Sciences’ model is that it allows investors to provide funding “a la carte” into specific drug development programs, according to Alex Lash of The In Vivo Blog. Lash also says it provides a way to provide investors a return on their capital without selling the underlying science, which would remain with the holding company.

VentureWire says Versant provided seed funding for Inception 1 to discover drugs for treating neurodegenerative diseases. Inception 2 is focusing on metabolically targeted drugs designed to cut off a tumor’s fuel supply.

The holding company, which has 25 employees, anticipates forming Inception 3 in mid-2012 or early 2013.

I sent Prasit another query about Inception this morning, with no response yet. But I’m still hoping.

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.