Ambit Biosciences has gone through several course changes in the 12 years since it was founded. But Ambit CEO Michael Martino says the San Diego company would not be announcing $25 million raised from existing investors today unless Ambit was making significant progress on its current trajectory.
“What the financing represents is a huge vote of confidence by all the Series D investors who have invested in this Series E round,” Martino said in a phone interview. In a statement today, Ambit says the $25 million is the first tranche of $50 million in a preferred stock financing that will be used mostly to advance its anti-cancer drug quizartinib (designated previously as AC220) for acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
As Luke explained a few years ago, Ambit has been working to develop a group of small-molecule drugs that block certain enzymes called kinases, and quizartinib is Ambit’s lead drug candidate. The company says it has completed a 333-paitent, mid-stage trial of quizartinib in relapsed AML patients with the FLT3 kinase mutation, a particularly aggressive form of the disease. About one-third of AML patients, or 4,000 new cases a year, are estimated to have the FLT3 kinase mutation.
Ambit plans to disclose the
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.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
