Italian venture capital firm, Principia SGR, has invested €4 million ($4.18 million) in AnaBios, a San Diego-based firm that provides drug discovery and preclinical services and partnerships based on its Phase X® human tissue platform. The investment is part of a $10 million Series B round of fundraising to support the expansion of AnaBios’s own contract research capabilities and in-house drug programs. “Principia's objective is to help grow the value of AnaBios worldwide but with a special emphasis on Europe, where the adoption of the Phase X technology will greatly benefits pharmaceutical companies and, ultimately, patients,” commented Paolo Siviero, Principia healthcare fund manager.
AnaBios’s technology allows drug safety and efficacy testing using ethically procured human organs, tissues, and cells. The ex vivo approach underpins the firm’s Phase X technology, which it says enables the investigation of human drug responses at the preclinical stage of drug discovery. In addition to offering drug discovery services to the global pharmaceutical industry, AnaBios is also carrying out drug discovery in pain and heart disease.
During early December 2016, AnaBios inked a collaboration agreement with Purdue Pharma focused on leveraging the Phase X platform to expedite development of Purdue’s Nav1.7 sodium ion channel drug candidates for the treatment of chronic pain. Under the terms of the agreement Purdue Pharma licensed to AnaBios a suite of patents for Nav1.7 sodium ion channel blockers. AnaBios will use the Phase X technology to select a clinical candidate.
