San Diego-based PharmAkea Therapeutics, founded last year by key scientists from Amira Pharmaceuticals, said it has raised $10 million in Series A funding from San Francisco’s Bay City Capital.
PharmAkea, founded by John Hutchinson, Jilly Evans, and Kevin Holme, also secured a $35 million commitment from Celgene (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CELG]]) as part of a three-year collaboration to advance the startup’s work on small-molecule drugs for cancer and fibrotic diseases. In a statement, Hutchinson said, “We see tremendous potential to leverage our expertise in the emerging biological understanding of connective tissue disorders to develop new therapeutics for these grave diseases, which carry high morbidity and mortality and affect a significant portion of the population.”
Celgene, which provided seed funding for PharmAkea, holds an option to extend its collaboration. In addition, Celgen plans to take an equity stake in the startup, and will retain an exclusive option to acquire PharmAkea.
In a statement Friday, PharmAkea said Robert Williamson, a veteran life sciences executive who was previously a partner with The Boston Consulting Group, has joined the company as CEO.
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.
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