Torrey Pines Investment Raises $30 Million Toward $150M Target For Next Fund

Torrey Pines Investment, a San Diego life sciences investment firm with close ties in Russia, has raised $30 million for a second venture fund that is targeting $150 million.

Nicolay Savchuk, a Russian-born mathematician and Torrey Pines director, was traveling yesterday and said he was not available to comment on the fund-raising effort, which was reported previously by Mergermarket and VentureWire.

In an email to me, though, Savchuk said, “The capital will be used to finance acquisition and development or co-development of [drug] candidates from pharma and biotech companies towards monetization event at the next big value step—usually at the proof of concept in human [trials].”

Savchuk and Jay Lichter, the CEO of San Diego-based aFraxis, outlined how co-development works in a presentation last month to the San Diego Venture Group. Lichter said aFraxis completed pre-clinical testing of a promising compound for treating a form of autism in record time, and at a savings of roughly $4 million, by joining forces with Torrey Pines Investment. Savchuk explained that in exchange for an equity stake in aFraxis, his company financed the pre-clinical testing through a full-service contract research organization it owns near Moscow. The testing validated a neurological target for Fragile X syndrome that was identified in the laboratory of MIT Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa.

Savchuk told the venture group audience that his firm likes to identify and invest in potential drug candidate “assets”—and use its R&D capabilities in Russia to produce “data packages” that hopefully validate continued development.

In his email to me, Savchuk explained that Torrey Pines Investment plans to use its funding to continue similar collaborations, which are arranged by Torrey Pines and its affiliate ChemRar High Tech Center of Moscow. Torrey Pines, he said, works “in partnership with original pharma, biotech, or in concert with like-minded investors executing virtual development model similar to Afraxis, Roche / Viriom and other deals we closed in the recent past.”

The ChemRar High Tech Center is part of a bio-medical research cluster in Moscow that was key to Russian Pharma 2020, the government-industry partnership that outlined a way to update Russia’s pharmaceutical industry.

Torrey Pines Investment was formed in 2002. Savchuk has not disclosed how much was raised in the firm’s first fund or how many deals it has done, although he told VentureWire the second fund already is bigger than the firm’s first fund.

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.