The VentureLab graduate is commercializing technology that will allow scientists to evaluate the electrophysiology of neural cells and cardiac cells.

Axion develops and sells life science instrumentation. The company’s product, which includes an electronic device integrated with microelectrodes, improves the drug screening process by rapidly extracting valuable information from more complex tissues and cultures, company.

Axion’s product helps advance the government’s objective of reducing animal testing by giving scientists insight into the behavior of cells.

Privately held Axion , which has 21 employees, has been awarded four SBIR grants, totaling about $3.1 million. In 2010, the company raised more than $2 million from private investors.

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2012/05/axion-biosystems-raising-35m.html

The objective of the MJFF-funded project is to develop an oral therapeutic that provides the symptomatic benefit of dopamine replacement therapy but with sustained efficacy and with minimal acute and long-term side effects. The therapeutic benefit of dopamine precursor L-DOPA (the current gold standard in treating PD) is hampered by serious side effects, including dyskinesia, compulsive behaviors and somnolence. Envoy Therapeutics’ bacTRAP^® technology enables the identification of new drug targets selectively expressed in brain circuits of therapeutic interest, thereby minimizing activity in circuits that may trigger unwanted side effects. Envoy has identified novel small molecule compounds that selectively engage the target of interest. Compounds have been optimized for potency, pharmacokinetic properties and central nervous system (CNS) penetration, and have shown efficacy in a PD model. With this funding, lead compounds will now be used to further validate the target hypothesis in more definitive in vivo models. Successful target validation will position the program to advance into safety assessment studies in readiness for clinical development.

“Levodopa is still the standard of care for people with Parkinson’s, but the side effects of levodopa treatment remain one of the most challenging aspects of living day to day with the disease. For this reason, developing improved symptomatic treatments that limit dyskinesia is a priority for our Foundation,” said Todd Sherer, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of MJFF. “We are hopeful that Envoy’s ongoing work to this end will lead to improved treatment for patients.”

“We are thrilled to expand our collaboration with the team at The Michael J. Fox Foundation, and to advance closer to safety studies and clinical development on a compound to effectively modulate the highly selective target we have discovered with our bacTRAP^® technology, ” added Steve Hitchcock, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery at Envoy. “Successful completion of this next phase will move us another significant step forward toward human clinical development.”

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsLang=en&newsId=20120507006044&div=-324146700

Charles Nicolette, Ph.D., chief scientific officer and vice president of research and development of Argos, said, “The Fast Track designation by the FDA recognizes the need for more effective treatments in metastatic RCC.”

The FDA´s Fast Track program is designed to facilitate the development and expedite the review of new drugs for the treatment of serious or life-threatening diseases with the potential to address unmet medical needs. Fast Track designation allows for the review timeline to be truncated to six months compared to the traditional 12 months.

The Phase 3 ADAPT study is a randomized, multicenter, open-label study of AGS-003 standard therapy versus standard therapy alone. Argos plans to enroll approximately 450 mRCC patients at approximately 100 clinical sites in North America and Europe. The primary endpoint for the ADAPT study is overall survival. Additional endpoints include overall response, immune response, progression-free survival and safety.

Regarding the Phase 2 clinical study, 21 patients with newly diagnosed metastatic clear cell RCC were enrolled. Treatment consisted of six-week cycles of sunitinib, four weeks on and two weeks off, plus AGS-003, which was administered as an intradermal injection every three weeks for five doses, and then every 12 weeks until progression in combination with sunitinib. Results presented during the 2012 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium indicated that the median progression-free survival in patients with newly diagnosed, unfavorable risk mRCC was 11.2 months and estimated Kaplan-Meier median overall survival was 29.3 months in this study, based upon follow-up through January 2012. In addition, AGS-003 was well tolerated in combination with sunitinib, with no immunotherapy related serious adverse events observed.

About the Arcelis™ Technology
Arcelis is Argos´s proprietary technology for personalizing RNA-loaded dendritic cell immunotherapies. This platform is based on optimizing a patient´s own (autologous) dendritic cells to trigger a tumor- or pathogen-specific immune response. To address the challenge of the unique genetic profile of each patient´s disease and the genetic mutations of that disease, Argos loads the autologous dendritic cells with a sample of messenger RNA (“mRNA”) isolated from the patient´s disease. Through this process, dendritic cells can potentially prime immune responses to the entire antigenic repertoire, resulting in an immunotherapeutic that is fully personalized for each patient´s disease.

http://www.argostherapeutics.com/news/2012/news_20120424_argosfinancing-FastTrackDesignation_Final.html