Bind banks $12.4M round as lead program heads into PhI

In the beginning of the year, when Cambridge, MA-based Bind Biosciences took the wraps off an $11 million round, the biotech company aroused considerable interest in the venture community. That interest helped spur a follow-up round for another $12.4 million in a Series C-1, which the developer is announcing today as it pushes ahead on active partnering talks--with one pact already quietly inked.

"The prior round was oversubscribed in January," CEO Scott Minick tells FierceBiotech. "A number of people were interested in investing in Bind, and a number of people followed up with us." Endeavour Vision stepped up as a new investor with current investors Polaris Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, NanoDimension and DHK Investments chipping in.

The new money leaves Bind, a biotech company that's developing a promising new nano-delivery mechanism with wide-ranging platform potential, with enough cash on hand to get its lead drug through a Phase I trial with another, yet-to-be-selected program, positioned to start its own early-stage study.

The financing shoves Bind-014 into the spotlight; a nanoparticle cancer therapeutic that packages docetaxel--a well known chemotherapy--in a tiny polymer package, coats it with polyethylene glycol to stealthily bypass the immune system and equips it with a targeting ligand to deliver the payload where its needed. The technology was thought through by MIT's ubiquitous Robert Langer and Omid Farokhzad of Harvard Medical School.

The staff at Bind has hit 30 and continues to grow. With a plethora of potential clinical programs and diseases to pick from, one of Bind's biggest challenges is to narrow down its work to the most promising programs and start delivering data. In the meantime, says Minick, he's found a "tremendous amount of interest" among potential partners, with one collaboration deal already signed with a company that wants to keep its involvement under wraps. "Several potential partnerships" are being discussed now, he adds.

- here's the press release for more info

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