A $30 million Series B investment round for
Allozyne Inc. represents the third B round graduation for biotech incubator
Accelerator Corp., with the monoclonal antibody engineering company following autoimmune and inflammatory disease drug developer VLST Corp., which
raised $55 million in May 2006, and infectious disease and cancer drug developer Spaltudaq Corp., which
raised $29 million March 2007.
Racking up $114 million in follow-on funding is a decent record for the commercial launch-pad, which was formed by venture capital firms MPM Capital, OVP Venture Partners, Amgen Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and Versant Ventures, along with real estate syndicate Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc., to piggyback on Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology. It almost looks like a fairy tale success story for the sort of public-private business development partnerships that every large metropolitan area seems to have in hopes of luring biotech or other vaunted clean industries to a region. Only in this case it's more of a philanthropic-private sort of deal.
The Institute for Systems Biology was born in 2000 as the fruition of an effort begun in 1992, when Bill Gates personally recruited Leroy Hood to come to the University of Washington to heighten the profile of its biotech programs. After building up the University's molecular biotech program from scratch, Hood, who established several Southern California biotechnology companies, including Applied Biosystems Group and Amgen Inc., then created the Institute to meld digital technology with biology. Among the group's specialties is bioinformatics, which takes advantage of high-capacity computer processing of the rapidly expanding library of genetic information.
Drawing on the region's information technology prowess, the Gates-born initiatives have already turned Seattle into a hotbed of biotech development, rivaling the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and the Boston area.
Still in Accelerator's early-stage portfolio are novel vaccine developer VieVax Corp., diagnostic and prognostic tools developer Homestead Clinical Corp., and tissue damage drug developer Seredigm Corp.
See Accelerator's investment portfolioSee Oct. 26 story from TheDeal.comSee June 2006 story from The Deal.com
Continue reading below
