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Vividion’s Backers Give It Good Starting Point With $50M

A recent infusion of cash launched a local biotech out of stealth mode with the biggest VC backing of the year so far in San Diego.

Vividion Therapeutics Inc., a San Diego company founded on the work of three local scientists, has scored $50 million from top-tier venture funds to develop its promising approach to drug development.

Arch Venture Partners and Versant Ventures, which both have $2 billion under management, led the funding. They were joined by the company’s founding investor Cardinal Partners.

Vividion’s core technology was developed in the lab of Ben Cravatt, a scientist at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. After Vividion was spun out of Cravatt’s lab, complementary research from two other Scripps scientists, Phil Baran and Jin-Quan Yu, was incorporated into Vividion.

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Previous Endeavors

This isn’t the first time Baran and Cravatt have produced companies from their research. Cravatt co-founded the San Diego biotechs Abide Therapeutics (partnered with Big Pharma company Celgene Corp.) and ActivX Biosciences. And Baran co-founded the new ocean-inspired upstart Sirenas Marine Discovery, which recently scored a sizable grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a research collaboration with the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr).

Vividion is still on a nationwide hunt for a CEO, but the company has recruited biomedical executive Tom Daniel to serve as its executive chairman. Daniel was formerly president of global research and early development for Celgene, which has a significant presence here in San Diego.

Solving a Bottleneck

Vividion (pronounced Vivid-eon) has been working in stealth mode for the past two years, until last month when its cover was blown by a regulatory form filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission signaling its bid to raise $50 million.

The company aims to solve a bottleneck in translating research to therapies, Cravatt said, potentially producing drugs that work better in animal and human trials.

As it stands today, drugs are screened and developed using protein targets that are produced in “non-native settings,” meaning that proteins are taken out of a cell, put into a test tube and then studied. The environment that the drug is developed in is artificial, and there’s a risk that results achieved in a test tube won’t translate to animal or human trials.

“You hope it will go back into the body and affect the protein the same way it affected it in the test tube,” Cravatt said. “Unfortunately, that process breaks down a lot.”

Tapping the Genetic Information

Vividion’s technology allows proteins to be studied inside their native systems — in whole cells, in tissues, and in

organisms.

Cravatt and his colleagues have worked for years to reach these “undruggable” targets by finding previously undetectable cellular molecular interactions involved in disease processes.

“It’s imperative that biotech and pharmaceutical companies leverage the amazing amount of genetic information that’s emerged over the last half decade to select targets and programs for drug development,” Cravatt said. “That is the most telling information that can help us select targets with a higher degree of success.”

Will Need More Money

For the investors, that justifies a $50 million Series A for an early-stage company working at the intersection of chemistry and biology. 

“At its largest, we’re uncovering an enormous amount of target space,” said Kristina Burow, managing director of Arch Venture Partners, a lead investor in the deal. “And we’re doing it in a way that chemically is very smart, and puts us in good position to take these early leads and develop them much faster than the standard.”

Burow said that $50 million is a good starting point, but she imagines Vividion will be raising again shortly.

“We’re building this company such that we’ll be staffed and financed to take these programs all the way to commercialization, and $50 million won’t get us there,” Burow said.

Vividion currently has about 10 employees, and works out of a leased space from The Scripps Research Institute. The company plans to move soon to its own office near the institute.

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