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Started thread, as I'm tired of parking releases elsewhere (& it ought to IPO soonish) ...
May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Athersys Inc., announced today the completion of a $47.5 million private placement of Class F Convertible Preferred stock to selected institutional and other accredited investors.
The financing included investments from multiple institutions, including: INVESCO Funds, Van Wagoner Funds, Crestwood Capital Partners, Cogene Biotech Ventures, Roxbury Capital, Chelsey Capital, KBC Equity Funds, MCP Global Corporation, President Life Sciences, Manschot Opportunity Fund, TalMor Capital Management, Curran Partners, Emerging Growth Management, and DRW Venture Partners.
``The RAGE technology has important applications in high throughput drug screening, functional genomics, and therapeutic protein production. This technology enables direct measurement of a protein's function without prior knowledge of its DNA sequence, addressing a significant bottleneck in the field of functional genomics,'' stated Dr. Thomas Caskey, former senior vice president, human genetics and vaccines discovery at Merck Research Laboratories, former president of the Merck Genome Research Institute, and current chief operating officer and president of Cogene Biotech Ventures in Houston. ``The Athersys team has focused the application of this exciting technology toward extremely valuable therapeutic targets. Cogene Biotech Ventures is pleased to support this excellent scientific team.''
Previous investors contributed $8.5 million to the financing and included: Blue Chip Venture Co., Primus Venture Partners, Warburg Dillon Read, Sentron Medical Ventures, NeoMed Innovation, Hoegh Invest, and the Ohio Innovation Fund. The placement agents for the financing were Dain Rauscher Wessels and ING Barings.
``This is a significant milestone for Athersys. Proceeds from this offering will be used to accelerate our high throughput functional genomics programs, enabling us to further characterize the thousands of novel genes and proteins that we have already discovered. It will also allow us to move our lead therapeutic proteins closer to clinical development,'' said Dr. Gil Van Bokkelen, president and chief executive officer of Athersys. ``In addition, it enables us to broaden the RAGE-VT(TM) program, which is a novel way of creating cell lines that express validated drug targets, without having to clone the genes that express specific proteins of interest.''
Dr. Van Bokkelen will present information about this financing and discuss the Company's RAGE (Random Activation of Gene Expression)(TM) technology today at the Innovative Drug Development conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
The RAGE technology enables the activation and expression of genes on a genome wide basis, without relying on the use of conventional gene cloning or cDNA technology. As a result, it enables high throughput functional analysis of the entire human genome, and is compatible with a wide variety of different experimental systems. These unique capabilities accelerate the linkage of important functional information with gene sequence data. By leveraging RAGE, Athersys can commercially produce specific therapeutic proteins, validate biological targets for drug development and conduct rapid phenotypic screening on a genome-wide basis for novel gene discovery. This press release and further information on Athersys Inc. can be found on the World Wide Web at: athersys.com.
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