AmpliMed Secures $8.5 Million in Additional Series B Financing
Oncology Drug Development Company to Use Funds to Achieve Milestones in Clinical Development
TUCSON, Ariz.-- AmpliMed® Corporation today announced a second closing of its Series B Preferred private placement of $8.5 million, raising the total invested in the round to approximately $14.6 million. The Series B was led by Biotech Insight Ventures and included InvestBio Ventures, Valley Ventures and Solstice Capital, all of whom were previous investors. To date, AmpliMed has raised more than $24 million in financing.
“AmpliMed continues to achieve significant milestones in the development of its anticancer drugs,†said Joel R. Smolen, Managing General Partner at Biotech Insight Management, L.L.C., which manages Biotech Insight Ventures L.P. “We are very excited about the Company’s accomplishments over this past year and look forward to the outcomes of several key clinical trials in melanoma and pancreas cancer scheduled to be completed early next year.â€
AmpliMed’s multi-center studies using a combination of Amplimexon® and common chemotherapeutic agents in Stage IV metastatic melanoma (Phase II) and advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma (Phase Ib) are scheduled to be completed early next year. An additional trial in patients with breast, lung and prostate cancer is also underway.
“Our investors’ support underscores their commitment to our clinical development program and our growing pipeline of anticancer therapies,†said Robert A. Ashley, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of AmpliMed. “These new funds will enable us to complete our current Phase I and II trials of Amplimexon and position the Company to launch into the next phase of our clinical development program.â€
About Amplimexon
Amplimexon is the name of AmpliMed’s formulation of imexon for injection. Imexon is a cyanoaziridine compound which showed tantalizing evidence of activity in limited studies in lung cancer, melanoma and breast cancer that were documented in publications in the 1980s. The potential of imexon as a cancer drug was never fully explored, until 1994, when AmpliMed co-founding scientists Drs. Evan Hersh, David Alberts, Robert Dorr and William Remers initiated a program to decipher Amplimexon’s novel mechanism of action. This led to the initiation in 2003 of a Phase I clinical study of the drug as a stand-alone therapy in late-stage cancer patients. Further preclinical research revealed that the combined use of Amplimexon and certain other chemotherapeutics resulted in a significant increase in efficacy compared to either drug alone. These findings are now being translated into a series of Phase I/II clinical studies of combination therapy in patients with various types of cancer.
About AmpliMed Corporation
AmpliMed Corporation was founded in 1989 with the support of the University of Arizona Technology Development Corporation and is focused on the clinical development of chemotherapeutic agents for cancer. AmpliMed’s strategy is to develop anti-cancer drugs with novel mechanisms of action designed to overcome some of the limitations, such as myelosuppression (suppression of blood cell counts), multi-drug resistance (treatment-induced resistance to many cancer drugs) and cardiac toxicity, frequently associated with current cancer therapy. The company’s lead product, Amplimexon (imexon for inj.), is in Phase II clinical trials. Other products in the company’s portfolio include benzimate which entered the clinic in 2006, Amplizone™, expected to enter the clinic in 2007, and a portfolio of derivatives of each of the lead compounds for future development. AmpliMed Corporation is based in Tucson, Arizona and is on the Web at http://www.amplimed.com.