Rechristened Laguna Pharmaceuticals Raises $30M, Moves To San Diego

Laguna Pharmaceuticals, founded in 2006 as a spinout of Cleveland, OH-based drug discovery and testing company ChanTest, has raised $30 million in a Series B round of venture funding and relocated in San Diego.

The company, previously known as ChanRx, also recruited former Amira Pharmaceuticals CEO Bob Baltera as CEO.

Versant Ventures and Frazier Healthcare led the $30-million round, which was joined by existing investor Santé Ventures. The round is expected to fund a late-stage clinical trial of Laguna’s lone drug, a 1,4-dialkylpiperazine derivative (Vanoxerine). The drug is intended to treat atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat estimated to currently affect about 2.3 million Americans.

The company raised $5 million in 2011 from Santé Ventures and ChanTest founder and CEO Arthur “Buzz” Brown. ChanTest began in 1998 to provide testing services to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies assess cardiac risk early in the process of drug development. Boston’s Charles River Laboratories acquired ChanTest for $54 million at the end of October.

While several drugs are currently available for treating heart arrhythmias, Laguna says current drug options are limited by poor efficacy and toxicity. In results from a mid-stage trial reported in late 2013, the company said 76 percent of the patients given the highest oral dose (400 mg) of Vanoxerine converted to a normal heart rhythm within 8 hours, and 84 percent converted within 24 hours—a rate approaching that of the electrical shock treatment known as direct current cardioversion.

In Baltera, Laguna gets a veteran CEO. The job at Laguna is his first CEO position since 2011, when he led the sale of Amira to Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: [[ticker:BMY]]) for $325 million in cash, with an additional $150 million tied to meeting certain development milestones.

At the time, Amira’s lead drug was a compound targeting pulmonary fibrosis, which Amira had advanced only through early stage clinical trials. Baltera successfully exempted two other drug candidates from the BMS deal, and a new company called Panmira Pharmaceuticals was established to advance development of those compounds.

Baltera will be joining Laguna’s co-founder and chief medical officer, Howard Dittrich, who worked previously at NovaCardia and other cardiovascular companies.

“This is about commercialization, it’s not about proof of concept,” Baltera told me in a recent phone interview. Laguna “is going to be a lean, mean, product development and commercialization machine.”

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.