Sequoia Pharmaceuticals Secures Funding to Test its Unique AIDS Drug
Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company focused on discovering novel drugs to combat drug-resistant viral infections, today announced that it closed on a $22 million Series B round of financing. The financing is expected to fund early stage clinical trials of the Company’s novel drug designed to combat wild-type- and multi-drug-resistant strains of HIV.
Gaithersburg, MD (PRWEB) March 20, 2005 - Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a
pharmaceutical company focused on discovering novel drugs to combat
drug-resistant viral infections, today announced that it closed on a $22 million
Series B round of financing. The investment syndicate was led by Health Care
Ventures of Cambridge, MA, and includes Sofinnova Partners of Paris; Aberdare
Ventures of San Francisco; and the Wellcome Trust of London. The financing is
expected to fund early stage clinical trials of the Company’s novel drug
designed to combat wild-type- and multi-drug-resistant strains of HIV, and to
continue two additional drug discovery and development
programs.
Sequoia’s discovery team is led by Chief Scientific Officer
John Erickson, PhD, who founded the anti-viral program at Abbott Laboratories in
the 1980s and pursued structure-based drug design at the National Cancer
Institute (NCI) in the 1990s. Erickson’s scientific team from NCI makes up the
core of Sequoia’s senior scientists. “This investment is a major step for our
company and a great validation for our technology,” said Erickson. “It offers us
the opportunity to get our primary AIDS drug candidate into the clinic and to
accelerate the development of our other drug programs.”
The company’s
novel Resistant-Repellent® HIV protease inhibitor showed promise in preclinical
tests of being effective the wild-type virus and against more than 95 percent of
the drug-resistant HIV mutants isolated from patients that were failing highly
active anti-retroviral therapy. These early stage successes were highlighted at
the meeting for Frontiers in Drug Development for Antiretroviral Therapy, held
in December 2004.
In addition to the HIV protease inhibitor program,
Sequoia has initiated preclinical tests of a Resistant-Repellent® drug to combat
Hepatitis C, as well as a proprietary Molecular Cloaking technology that confers
superior pharmacokinetic profiles on various therapeutic agents. The Cloaking
technology was unveiled at the American Society for Microbiology’s 44th Annual
International Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that took
place in Washington, D.C. last October.
About Sequoia Pharmaceuticals,
Inc.:
Sequoia Pharmaceuticals Inc. was founded in 2002 and is a drug
development company focused on novel drugs to combat drug-resistant viral
infections, especially HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. Sequoia is developing
revolutionary new treatments for viral diseases with a focus on the growing
global problem of drug-resistant infectious diseases. Most anti-infective drugs
were designed to block the most prevalent form of a pathogen. Those drugs are
doomed to become obsolete due to the emergence of drug-resistant mutations.
Sequoia's mission includes meeting this challenging problem by developing
effective therapeutic solutions to combat the emergence of drug resistance.
For more information on Sequoia, please visit www.sequoiapharma.com.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/3/prweb219954.htm