Brain trust: Local biotech company could help shape future of Alzheimer’s, brain injury treatments10/30/2014 A local biotechnology company should begin human clinical trials on two new drugs that affect neural pathways in the brain within the next year, and the results could open up new horizons of hope for sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and other cognitive impairments, the company’s founder says.Grand Rapids-based Tetra Discovery Partners recently announced new private funding from the Grand Angels investment group, and Tetra founder, chairman and CEO Dr. Mark Gurney says that with the new funding and its existing grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), his company has the resources needed to ready two of its drug candidates for human clinical trials and apply for FDA approval for those tests. The new drugs should begin clinical trials by next September, Gurney says, and Tetra should have significant data about the drugs and their efficacy in humans “within about three years from now,” he adds. Gurney, who has a background in brain and cognitive science and previously worked for an international biotechnology company before he started Tetra in 2011, says that his company’s two new drugs work in fundamentally different ways from the treatment options that are currently available to Alzheimer’s and TBI patients, and could significantly improve patients’ quality of life if the company’s early results translate to human trials. The company’s brain injury drug, Dr. Gurney says, aims to improve learning and memory in patients who have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The drug works, he says, by reducing inflammation in the brain, which seems to be one of the primary causes of cognitive impairment in TBI patients. “With this brain injury drug,” he says, “we have a model where a rat that has sustained a brain injury three months earlier is really not able to learn. A single dose of the drug, and that animal has its learning restored to normal levels.” “What’s interesting,” he adds, “is that in the presence of the drug, when dosed with the drug, [the rat] can make a memory, but then if you take away the drug, it can retrieve that memory, but [now] it can’t form a new memory [again]. So it’s really quite amazing, the way these drugs are working on the brain.”
Alzheimer’s drug, meanwhile, works to “modulate,” or re-configure, a particular fundamental neural pathway in the brain that contributes to memory and learning, Dr. Gurney says. While current drugs that treat memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients can usually only prevent the patient’s memory from worsening, Gurney says, early results on Tetra’s drug suggest that it could actually reverse a patient’s cognitive decline and restore memory functions that had previously been lost. “The [Alzheimer’s] drugs we’re working with actually improve memory in healthy animals,” Gurney says. “So they improve performance beyond what the healthy person is currently capable of. So with Alzheimer’s patients, we hope it will help improve their ability in daily living. We’d like to see an improvement rather than just them not worsening.” Besides Alzheimer’s disease, Gurney says, the drug’s ability to reconfigure a patient’s neural pathways means that it might also have applications in treating Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and schizophrenia, among other cognitive-impairment conditions. “It’s a very fundamental biochemical pathway in the brain that this drug is affecting,” Gurney says. “And what the animal studies are telling us is that the efficacy should be very good, and it could be very helpful to patients across all these different diseases.” Dr. Lance Stewart, a managing partner at Tetra Discovery who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and virology, says that Dr. Gurney’s drugs for traumatic brain injury comprise some of the most promising and exciting treatment options he’s seen since he first took a scientific interest in the area of TBI in the 1990s. Stewart previously worked with Dr. Gurney at deCODE genetics, Inc., an Iceland-based biopharmaceutical company. The two worked together on discovering molecules for cognition enhancement until 2010, when financial difficulties at deCODE caused both scientists to pursue other ventures. Stewart’s new company, Emerald BioStructures, quickly began collaborating with Tetra, and Stewart eventually transitioned out of the company and wound up at Tetra himself. “I had worked on cognition with Mark [Gurney] before,” Stewart says, “but I was struck by the lack of anything for traumatic brain injury, anything for recovery or along those lines. I had looked at it in the ‘90s and just found that it was a tremendously challenging area. Since every TBI is different, it’s very hard to run clinical trials on TBI and receive solid outcomes.” “I think there’s a better understanding of memory and cognition at the molecular level [now],” he continues, “which is going to help companies like Tetra develop drugs in a smarter way using imaging. There are tons of new brain imaging technologies today that are enabling us to have a better understanding of how drugs affect chemistry in the brain.” Dr. Stewart’s interest in traumatic brain injury, in particular, has a deeply personal component. His son, Jackson, suffered severe head trauma in a 2011 car crash at the age of 18, and spent over 20 days in a coma. Although Jackson regained consciousness and recovered his ability to walk and talk, Dr. Stewart says his son faced a long road of rehabilitation and recovery, and has since struggled with slurred speech, balance issues, memory and speech challenges, and nerve palsy and vision impairment in his right eye. Besides the cognitive effects of the injury, Jackson experienced significant personality changes after the crash — a known and well-documented phenomenon that sometimes occurs after a traumatic brain injury. Although Dr. Stewart says he and his wife found Jackson to be more mature and reflective after the crash, Jackson also felt disconnected from his life before the injury, he says. At one point, Stewart says, his son pored over posts from his old Facebook account to re-learn about himself. Later, he deleted the old account and started from scratch with a new one. “He’s still recovering today, slowly,” Dr. Stewart says of his son. “So it was very disruptive for him, and it resets one’s priorities. You go on with your daily life until you face a close-to-death experience like that out of the blue, and then suddenly everything else just kind of falls by the wayside.” Dr. Stewart says he hopes that Tetra’s TBI drugs could one day speed the long process of rehabilitation for patients like Jackson, who is today enrolled in a degree program at the University of Colorado in Boulder as he continues his recovery. “Mark’s drugs are not meant for critical care — it’s not something you would take to save yourself,” Stewart says. “There are other drugs people are working on like that, but… One thing that’s very clear [with TBI] is that the ability to rapidly recover depends on the ability of the brain to establish memories in the short term and long term, because you’re having to re-learn a lot of things.” “So molecules like Mark is working on could potentially be used in conjunction with rehab in the future,” he finishes, “to really accelerate rehabilitation of patients after an injury.” Although Drs. Stewart and Gurney and the other managing partners at Tetra provide the industry experience and scientific expertise that fuels the company’s drug innovations, Dr. Gurney says Grand Valley State University deserves credit for some of the company’s ability to create cutting-edge drug platforms out of West Michigan. Without the incubator space in the GVSU Cook-DeVos Center, where Tetra’s office resides, and its associated life-science lab space, Gurney says, Tetra wouldn’t be able to exist in Grand Rapids. He also credits a statewide and nation-spanning network of biomedical science collaborators, including the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT and the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, in helping Tetra Discovery Partners to raise its nationwide profile and expand its scope. “For a small West Michigan company, we’ve really been able to reach outside the state,” Gurney says, “and it’s basically the quality of the science and the innovative nature of the drugs we’re working on here that excites people.” Steven Thomas Kent is the editor at Roadbelly magazine and a high-tech, high-growth features writer at Rapid Growth Media. Stalk him on Twitter@steventkent or e-mail him at steven.t.kent@gmail.com for story tips and feedback. Photography by Adam Bird
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KALAMAZOO, MI — (Marketwired) — 08/21/14 — Vestaron Corporation, a company that designs environmentally friendly insecticides, announced today a first close on the sale of its Series C Preferred Stock. This $10M round, which was led by new investor Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, a fund specializing in food and agricultural companies, also included major current investors including Southwest Michigan First Life Science Venture Fund, Open Prairie Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Michigan Accelerator Fund, and others.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Cultivian to the Vestaron team. Their expertise in the agricultural arena will be a great addition to our Board of Directors, and their experience in bringing agricultural products to market will be of tremendous help as we commercialize our first product, a biological insecticide,” said John Sorenson, CEO of Vestaron. This product, a naturally occurring peptide, was approved by the EPA for commercial sale in February. Ron Meeusen, Managing Director of Cultivian Sandbox, said, “We’ve followed Vestaron for several years now and this is clearly the right time for Cultivian Sandbox to invest in the Company. They have made tremendous technical progress in the past two years, and the commercialization of their first product is exciting indeed.” Vestaron exploits the natural insecticidal properties of a class of peptides which have potent insect killing potential but which are safe to humans, birds, fish, and the environment, including honeybees. These peptides utilize new modes of action that have never been used in insect control, and therefore do not suffer from insect resistance. In addition to the bioinsecticide, the Company is putting the genes for the peptide into crop plants, and is modeling the active sites of the peptides to identify synthetic mimics that also have a favorable safety spectrum. Chairman of the Board of Directors of Vestaron and Pangaea Ventures General Partner Keith Gillard commented that, “Cultivian Sandbox is a terrific fit for Vestaron and they’ve come along at the perfect time as we move from a research and development company to a commercial company. Their input into the commercialization process will provide tremendous value as we move the company to the next level.” Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain “forward-looking” statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Information in this press release, which is not historical, is forward looking and involves a number of risks and uncertainties. Investors are cautioned not to put any undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. Actual results may differ materially from historical results of operations and those discussed in the forward-looking statements for various reasons, including, but not limited to the parties’ ability to carry out the business plan, successful development and commercial acceptance of products, ability to fund development necessary for products and for the pursuit of new product opportunities, ability to hire required personnel, the risk of whether products result from development activities, protection of the parties’ intellectual property portfolios, the risk associated with obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals, the ability to obtain foreign regulatory approvals for products and to establish marketing arrangements in countries where approval is obtained, and other potential factors. Contact: Nancy Newman Email Contact www.vestaron.com FENTON, Mich., Aug. 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Blackford Capital, a national private equity firm headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., today announced its investment in Fenton, Mich.-based Burgaflex North America, a leading manufacturer of coolant system tube and hose assemblies serving the heavy truck, agricultural and off-road markets. The transaction is the fourth by Blackford’s Michigan Prosperity Fund.
Burgaflex NA currently employs 350 people at its 200,000-square-foot facilities and serves heavy equipment customers including Caterpillar Inc., Deere & Company (John Deere), AB Volvo and Daimler Group. “Burgaflex is a perfect fit for the Michigan Prosperity Fund,” said Martin Stein, managing director of Blackford Capital. “The company’s focus on exceptional customer service and quality manufacturing has helped it build a strong reputation and a great growth trajectory. Our investment will help to grow the business and also bring jobs to one of the areas of Michigan hardest hit during the economic recession. We look forward to participating in the long-term success of both Burgaflex and the greater Flint region.” “Blackford Capital is exactly the partner we were looking for to help us strengthen our business and achieve our long-term growth objectives,” said David Kennedy, CEO of Burgaflex NA. “Their investment in Burgaflex will be good for the company, our employees and our community as we expand our operations, create new jobs and bring added products and resources to our customers.” The Michigan Prosperity Fund, created in 2012, invests in Michigan companies to generate best-in-class equity returns, and also supports the Michigan economy by protecting and creating jobs locally. Grand Rapids-based Custom Profile, Inc., Metro Detroit-based Mopec, and Grand Haven-based Grand Transformers, Inc. are the other three companies currently in the fund. Burgaflex NA began operations in 2004 and both owners, Kennedy and David Bubnar, will remain with the company following Blackford’s acquisition. Kennedy will continue to serve as CEO and Bubnar as a consultant. Mercantile Bank Corp. and Capitala Finance Corp. provided financing for the transaction. Blackford Capital also announced, in line with its commitment to support its management teams and the expansion of the business, that it has named 10 people to the Burgaflex board of directors:
About Blackford Capital Blackford Capital is a private equity firm based in Grand Rapids, Mich., that acquires, manages and builds middle-market manufacturing, distribution and service companies, with seven portfolio companies that employ more than 1,300 people and generate combined revenues of approximately $225 million. Blackford has offices in Grand Rapids (headquarters) and Santa Monica, CA. Blackford Capital reviewed roughly 3,400 transactions in 2013, and has closed 27 transactions in the past seven years. Burgaflex is Blackford’s seventh portfolio company and its fourth in Michigan. The firm’s investment criteria includes mature, profitable businesses with revenues between $20 million and $100 million, and with management teams that are either willing to remain with the company or are seeking to retire. For more information, visit www.blackfordcapital.com . About Burgaflex NA Burgaflex NA is a leading manufacturer of tube and hose assemblies for the heavy truck and agriculture markets. Since 2004, Burgaflex has been meeting the growing needs of a diverse range of customers by focusing on manufacturing quality products at competitive prices. For more information, visit www.burgaflexna.com . SOURCE Blackford Capital Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing (GRAM), a CMO for aseptic pharmaceutical filling, received $9.8 million in capital to expand its facilities, which will create life science jobs in West Michigan. Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (MERS) of Michigan, a nonprofit organization, led the $9.8 million investment round, supported by other Michigan and Indiana-based investors.
“We are delighted with the strong investor response, especially by MERS,” said Tom Ross, GRAM president. “Their considerable support, in combination with the backing from many private investors in our community, is a strong indicator that we’re headed in the right direction. This funding enables us to expand our capabilities, improve our facility, and advance our customer reach, all while creating more highly technical, high-paying jobs in West Michigan.” Source: Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing KALAMAZOO, Mich., June 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Ablative Solutions, Inc., a privately-held clinical stage company, announced today the issuance of U.S. Patent No. 8,740,849, entitled “Peri-Vascular Tissue Ablation Catheter with Support Structures.” Some aspects of the issued patent relate to unique micro-needle-equipped catheters for the precise delivery of fluids into a variety of tissue targets. For example, the catheters can be used in peri-vascular or peri-urethral applications for the ablation of tissue.
“We are delighted to expand our intellectual property portfolio with this new U.S. patent. It is important to our corporate strategy, as it creates a barrier to entry and solidifies ASI’s position as the emerging leader in site-specific and precise delivery of medications,” noted Vartan Ghazarossian, PhD, President of Ablative Solutions. “This patent is significant, as it protects central elements of our fluid-delivery technology and could suggest our receiving additional protection from other patent applications currently under review.” About ASI Ablative Solutions was founded in 2011 by Tim Fischell, MD, FACC, and David Fischell, PhD, and is headquartered in Kalamazoo, MI, with offices in Menlo Park, CA. Ablative Solutions has developed endovascular catheters that are designed to address life-threatening diseases by providing a durable and cost-effective means for the targeted delivery of diagnostic and therapeutic agents to the perivascular space of blood vessels. Forward-Looking Statements Statements made in this press release that look forward in time or that express beliefs, expectations or hopes regarding future occurrences or anticipated outcomes or benefits are forward-looking statements. A number of risks and uncertainties, such as risks related to product development and commercialization efforts, results of clinical trials, ultimate clinical outcomes and benefit of the Company’s products to patients, market and physician acceptance of the Company’s products, intellectual property protection and competitive product offerings, could cause actual events to differ from the expectations indicated in these forward-looking statements. You are cautioned not to put any undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. This press release is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to purchase any particular securities. Any such offer or solicitation will be made only pursuant to definitive legal agreements prepared specifically for such purpose. An investment in the Company’s securities entails significant risks and is suitable only for sophisticated investors who can afford a loss of their entire investment; no assurance can be given that investment objectives will be achieved. In considering the performance information contained herein, you should bear in mind that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results; there can be no assurance that the Company will achieve comparable results or that any projected returns will be met. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, which are made as of the date hereof, even if new information becomes available in the future. For more information: Vartan Ghazarossian, PhD President (650) 321-6884 http://www.ablativesolutions.com SOURCE Ablative Solutions, Inc. Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1978390#ixzz34KugE3lJ |
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