Selecta Biosciences has gained $15.1 million in a Series B financing round. Existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures led the round, joined by NanoDimension and immunologist and Harvard Professor Timothy A. Springer. The Watertown, MA-based company was formed in May of 2008 by Omid Farokhzad, Professor Ulrich von Andrian of Harvard Medical School, and MIT Professor Robert Langer.
The company started with $2.5 million in seed financing from Polaris Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures. "In this economic environment," Farokhzad says, "our success in raising capital from top notch investors is a wonderful validation of Selecta's team and technology."
Selecta is developing nanoparticle immunomodulatory drugs for the treatment and prevention of human diseases. The firm says its platform technology allows it to design targeted nanoparticles which can deliver the drug to specific immune cells in the body, thus making it more potent at low doses while reducing the chance of side effects.
The company plans to begin trials as soon as 2010, but hasn't revealed which drugs it plans to develop first, Xconomy reports.
- check out the Selecta release
- read more about Selecta at Xconomy
ALSO: Selecta isn't the only company quietly making its way to the top. Hepregen, another company being touted for its innovative drug development technology, announced its official start-up. The MIT spin-off company closed a series A tranche of $5 million with Batelle Ventures and Innovation Valley Partners last September. Hepregen is developing technology that would predict the liver's response to drugs. "Since up to 80 percent of all drugs are metabolized or detoxified in the liver, the safety of drugs as they travel through the liver is of prime importance to the pharmaceutical industry," said Hepregen President and CEO Bernadette Fendrock, who co-founded the Medford, MA-based company with fellow MIT researchers Salman Khetani and Drs. Sangeeta Bhatia. Release