I have the hazy outlines of a scoop for you, my dear readers:
Two more companies have been born out of Avalon Ventures’ unconventional, $495 million alliance with British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC, according to Douglas Downs, a managing partner and chief financial officer at Avalon Ventures.
He told me no more than that, but information about these two new startups will soon be released.
The GSK-Avalon partnership, announced more than a year ago, will create and bankroll 10 new San Diego drug companies. It announced the first, Sitari Pharmaceuticals Inc., with a $10 million Series A financing round this part November, but has remained mum since.
“The GSK partnership is going quite well. We’ve formed three companies now, and have a couple more in the works,” Downs said. “We expect to fill out our 10 companies by the summer of 2015.”
Avalon has also established COI Pharmaceuticals — “Community of Innovation” — that will house and provide operational support, as well as a fully equipped research-and-development facility and an experienced leadership team to support Sitari and the other companies that will be created from the Avalon-GSK collaboration. Additionally, GSK (NYSE: GSK) opened a new office in San Diego earlier this year, with aims to expand its reach on the West Coast.
Interestingly, Downs said that Avalon has backed away from funding early-stage companies in conjunction with other venture firms — the traditional model for financing many upstarts.
“We have an early-stage investing dilemma with our agreement with GSK,” Downs said. “We’re not shopping out our early-stage deals with other venture people because of our closeness with GSK.”
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Speaking of startups: Janssen Labs, a life sciences incubator whose flagship operation is in San Diego, is making a major expansion in South San Francisco. It is a 30,000-square-foot incubator to accommodate up to 50 emerging life sciences companies.
“Our goal is to improve the investment profile of life science companies by drastically reducing the cost and time to market,” said Melinda Richter, head of Janssen Labs. “What started as an experiment has evolved into a proven, comprehensive model that is expanding. Ultimately, success is to bring more solutions to patients that need them.”
Janssen Labs in San Diego hosts about 35 startups, offering modular lab and office space as well as operational support, education and business services. It was launched in January 2012 as “an experiment,” Richter said, but has been wildly successful since. With this new expansion, Janssen will have the capacity to foster and support more than 100 life sciences startups, said Diego Miralles, global head of innovation at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ).
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Adamis Pharmaceuticals Corp., a maker of generic drugs, has filed a new drug application with the Food and Drug Administration for its cheaper alternative to the EpiPen. The epinephrine-filled syringe is meant for the emergency treatment of severe allergic reactions.
When I last spoke to Adamis (Nasdaq: ADMP) CEO Dennis Carlo, he told me that if the company’s generic alternative to EpiPens hits the market, it will be priced at a steep discount — as most generics are wont to do. EpiPens currently cost nearly $300 apiece; this new injection will run about $70.
“We feel this NDA submission represents a major milestone for Adamis,” Carlo said. “The epinephrine market is large and growing, and we estimate auto-injector sales in the U.S. this year to approach $1 billion.”
Adamis will likely not be the only company to enter this epinephrine market, so it’ll be worth watching the company to see if it gets to market with its less costly injection, and whether its sales will make a dent in that purported $1 billion market.
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La Jolla-based nonprofit California Institute for Biomedical Research, known as Calibr, has received an award from the Wellcome Trust, a British charitable foundation, for an undisclosed amount of money. The grant will help the institute develop a therapy to treat a hormone-based form of prostate cancer.
The award will fully support Calibr’s efforts to advance its therapy into investigational new drug status, which includes evaluating its preclinical efficacy, setting the stage for an industry-partnered phase 1 clinical trial.
Send news about locally based health care organizations, biotech and clean-tech to Meghana Keshavan at mkeshavan@sdbj.com. She can be reached at 858-277-6359.