Now backed with $25 million in venture funding, privately held biotech startup Receptos Inc. said last week that it will move forward with an FDA application that aims to begin testing its multiple sclerosis drug in a small number of people.
Before that happens late next year, the company will fine-tune a platform imaging technology used for identifying potential new drugs. It will be the bread and butter for the company as it moves forward with its own pipeline of drugs, targeting autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Biotech veteran William Rastetter, who most recently served as CEO of Apoptos, joined the company at the helm when Receptos bought Apoptos for an undisclosed sum in June.
Apoptos had raised $28 million from venture investors to develop a platform for anti-cancer drugs.
Receptos now aims to develop its 3-D crystallization imaging systems, created by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, to help guide researchers in their quest to develop drugs that tightly bind to their target, in this case the G-protein coupled receptors.
Chrysa Mineo, vice president of corporate development for the 20-person company, said as many as 40 percent of FDA-approved drugs on the market today hit the GPCR targets, including many blockbuster drugs in the areas of depression, high cholesterol and allergies.
“It’s a very important class of receptor targets for the pharmaceutical industry,” she said.
Mineo said the company is in active discussions with Big Pharma and Big Biotech to bring its technology to the forefront.
“We expect to bring corporate collaborators on board and we’ll be selecting additional GPCR receptors in conjunction with those collaborators,” she said.
Investors in Receptos include Arch Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, Lilly Ventures and Venrock.
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Investments On Hold: Mark Benedyk, who heads Pfizer Inc.’s La Jolla-based incubator program, said last week that the pharmaceutical giant’s merger with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals has put much of its investments on hold.
Two years ago, the company committed to spending $10 million a year for five years to bring fledgling life sciences companies under its wing. In exchange for first dibs at acquiring any resulting products or technologies, Pfizer gave each company roughly $2 million a year and access to all the equipment and administrative help it might need.
