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Immune Design Gets $18M for Vaccines and Adjuvants(BioWorld Today Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) By Trista Morrison Staff Writer Seattle-based start-up Immune Design Co. (IDC) raised $18 million in its first round of funding for work on adjuvants and vaccines that stimulate dendritic cells. Alta Partners, The Column Group and Versant Ventures served as co-lead investors in the Series A round. The money is expected to carry the adjuvant program through Phase II trials and the vaccine program through several "significant preclinical milestones," said Steven Reed, CEO of IDC. Reed knows first hand just how valuable adjuvants can be. Prior to founding IDC, he served as chief scientific officer of Corixa Corp., a Seattle-based biotech acquired by GlaxoSmithKline plc for $300 million, thanks predominantly to its monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) adjuvant. (See BioWorld Today, May 3, 2005.) Reed told BioWorld Today that IDC's adjuvant technology evolved out of his work at Corixa and was subsequently developed at the Infectious Disease Research Institute, which he founded. But while MPL is a biologic - as are adjuvants like granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and interleukin-2 (IL-2) - IDC uses a small molecule approach. Stimulating cytokine production with a small-molecule adjuvant is less expensive and potentially can avoid the toxicity problems associated with delivering a cytokine directly, Reed explained. IDC's small molecule, which stimulates antigen-presenting cells and cytokines, also offers advantages in terms of safety, potency and manufacturability compared to small-molecule adjuvants like CpG, he said. IDC's adjuvant program is expected to begin clinical trials within a year. Reed said the adjuvant will be applicable to a broad array of both vaccines and immunotherapeutics. Behind the adjuvant program, IDC is in preclinical studies with a viral vector vaccine platform that also stimulates antigen-presenting cells. Most existing vaccine technologies stimulate antibody production. While stimulation of a T-cell response would allow vaccines to target a host of new diseases, creating such a vaccine has proven challenging. To date, clinical trials of T-cell vaccines like Merck and Co Inc.'s HIV T-cell vaccine V520 and Dendreon Corp.'s prostate cancer vaccine Provenge (sipuleucel T) have failed to generate sufficiently strong immune responses to meet their endpoints. (See BioWorld Today, June 1, 2007, and Feb. 15, 2008.) IDC's vector was created by co-founder David Baltimore, Nobel laureate and president emeritus of the California Institute of Technology. It has resulted in "very large" immune responses, according to Ed Penhoet, partner with Alta Partners and chairman of IDC's board of directors. Yet while potency without direction can result in toxicity, IDC's vector is "highly specific to dendritic cells," Penhoet said. Reed also noted that while Dendreon's Provenge also targets antigen-presenting cells and dendritic cells, it does not use a vector and is ex vivo rather than in vivo. Development of the vaccine program initially will focus on viral diseases and other infectious diseases, although Penhoet noted that a number of different proteins can be inserted into the vector, allowing the "opportunity to almost tailor" the immune response. Reed and Baltimore co-founded IDC with Larry Corey, chief of infectious diseases at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center. Joining Baltimore and Penhoet on the board of directors are Richard Klausner, of The Column Group, and Brian Atwood, of Versant. Corey, meanwhile, heads up the scientific advisory board, which includes Ralph Steinman, of Rockefeller University; Inder Verma, of the Salk Institute; Rafi Ahmed, of Emory University School of Medicine; Martin Friede, of the World Heath Organization; and Bruce Beutler, of the Scripps Research Institute. n ? ? Copyright ? 2008 Thomson BioWorld, All Rights Reserved. |