[Updated 7:30 p.m., 5/13/09, with input from former GreenFuel interim CEO Bob Metcalfe, see below.] Cambridge, MA-based GreenFuel Technologies, which struggled for eight years to commercialize an industrial-scale process for growing algae that could be turned into biofuels or food, is closing down for lack of financing and selling off its technologies. Greentech Media broke the story earlier today.

Duncan McIntyre, an associate at Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, which participated in several venture rounds that raised more than $70 million for GreenFuel, told Greentech that the company could not raise the funds needed to build planned test facilities in Spain. “We are closing doors. We are a victim of the economy,” McIntyre told the publication.

Xconomy is seeking comment on the reported closure from GreenFuel CEO Simon Upfill-Brown. But Bob Metcalfe, a Polaris partner who was GreenFuel’s interim CEO prior to Upfill-Brown’s hiring and is its current board chairman, confirmed the shutdown in an e-mail message. “Simon Upfill-Brown and Holly Flesh [the company's vice president of business operations] are now working to sell GreenFuel’s technologies,” he wrote. “You could help by sending potential buyers their way.”

GreenFuel’s ride was a bumpy one. The company built its first field bioreactor, using specially bred strains of algae to capture carbon dioxide emissions and rapidly convert them into biomass through photosynthesis, at MIT in 2004. In 2005 the company hired energy industry veteran Cary Bullock as CEO to lead efforts to scale up the process. But in 2007, the company had to shut down its third-generation bioreactor facility in Arizona after the plant produced more algae than the company’s equipment could handle. At the same time, the company learned that its algae harvesting system would cost twice as much as expected. Some 25 employees, about half the company’s staff, were laid off as a result of the plant shutdown.

Metcalfe relieved Bullock as CEO after the setback, and spent the next year coordinating cost-cutting efforts, raising cash, restarting the Arizona bioreactor, rounding up strategic partners, and recruiting new leadership.

Things seemed to be looking up for the company by mid-2008. In March of that year the company signed a deal with Spanish cement maker Aurantia that was expected to bring up to $92 million to the company. (Cement plants are a huge source of carbon dioxide.) New CEO Upfill-Brown joined in July, and the company obtained additional Series B funding and began work on a fourth-generation algae bioreactor in Cambridge. By October, GreenFuel had finished the first phase of its work at the Aurantia plant, a 100-square-meter prototype greenhouse and harvesting operation. A 1,000-square-meter facility was to be ready by 2010, and the company was beginning to collect some of the funds promised by Aurantia.

But the startup was hit hard by the economic crisis and by the decline in petroleum prices from their 2008 peaks, which took much of the bloom off the biofuels rose. Upfill-Brown was not able to raise a Series C investment round on the timetable that he and Metcalfe had originally projected. In January, the company laid off 19 people—again, just under half of its staff—and decided to outsource the design and engineering work on the Aurantia project.

“We’ve got to weather this economic storm as best we can…” Upfill-Brown told Bob at the time. But he said he was optimistic about the company’s direction: “We pretty much feel GreenFuel is ahead [of other biofuels companies]…We’re going to keep plugging away, stay ahead.”

Apparently, the company could no longer keep its head above water. Which could become an increasingly familiar story as biofuel startups—none of which have come close to producing ethanol or other fuels at prices comparable to those of fossil-based fuels—burn through their cash and look to empty-handed investors for additional capital rounds.

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[Update: This report was updated at 6:10 PT with a statement from Sapphire Energy president C.J. Warner]

Citing a breakthrough, San Diego’s Sapphire Energy, a startup developing algae-to-fuel technology, today doubled its estimated production for 2011, saying that by then the company will be capable of producing 1 million gallons of diesel and jet fuel annually.

“We have made a recent significant technological breakthrough within our company and, combined with our ongoing development improvements, we’re able to project a higher number,” said C.J. Warner, who was named Sapphire’s president in December. “This is pretty exciting for us and, given the urgency of finding a renewable fuel solution across the nation and around the globe, we wanted to share our updated time line.”  Warner, who provided the comment by email through a  spokeswoman, did not explain the nature of Sapphire’s breakthrough.

Sapphire says it has developed proprietary methods that enable algae growing in non-potable water in desert areas to produce a “green crude” substitute that requires no changes to the petrochemical industry’s pipeline and refining infrastructure.

In a statement released by Sapphire around a military energy and fuels conference in Alexandria, VA, Sapphire vice president Brian Goodall said the company’s technology is ready now. The company says production will ramp up over the next several years, hitting the 1 million gallon figure sometime in 2011, climbing to 100 million gallons annually by 2018, and then to 1 billion gallons of fuel per year by 2025. Sapphire says this means it could be supplying enough fuel to meet nearly 3 percent of the country’s 36 billion gallon renewable fuel standard.

In January, Sapphire participated in test flights that successfully substituted jet fuel made from its “green crude” for conventional jet fuel. Aviation fuel is viewed as a key market for the biofuels industry because the U.S. Air Force is the largest single customer, and the specifications are more rigorous than for any other transportation fuel. The company says it has conducted several test flights with commercial airlines Continental and JAL.

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Redmond, WA-based Bionavitas has been pretty stealthy until today, when it offered a peek into what it thinks will enable it to corner a piece of the market for algae-based biofuels.

Biofuels made from algae have attracted a boomlet of interest in the past year, as investors and entrepreneurs have been impressed with its potential for producing vastly higher yields of renewable fuel than more inefficient sources of farmed biological material, like corn or soybeans. Some big-name investors, like Bill Gates and Arch Venture Partners, have placed their algae bet with San Diego-based Sapphire Energy, and there’s been a slew of other contenders emerging recently in southern California.

Here in the cloudy Northwest, we lack one of the critical ingredients of photosynthesis that helps algae thrive—the sun. But Bionavitas doesn’t seem to care. It has patents pending on what it calls “Light Immersion Technology” which it says will help overcome an important limitation of algae biofuel production. Most processes get stuck when algae start growing too dense, creating a “self-shading” problem that blocks light to algae lower down in the water, meaning it can only grow in a 3-5 centimeter layer in the water. The Bionavitas technology, using rods that extend down to distribute the light deep into the water in both open ponds and closed bioreactors, enables algae to grow efficiently in one full meter of water. This means the company says it can squeeze another 10-to-12 fold boost in yields over standard algae production techniques.

The technology “gives algae a legitimate shot at becoming a cost-effective and sustainable biofuel feedstock because we have cracked the code of the previous problem related to self-shading in algae growth,” says Bionavitas CEO Michael Weaver, in a statement. “This new technology is a game-changer because it results in quantities of algae production necessary for commercial use.”

Bionavitas didn’t say much in today’s statement in detail about its commercial opportunities, other than it sees applications of its algae-growth technology for biofuels, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and environmental uses like for cleaning up toxic spills.

Weaver cut his teeth as an IT entrepreneur before making the switch to cleantech when he co-founded Bionavitas in 2006. We’ll be sure to press him soon for more detail on what this new company has in store for the year ahead.

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One of the distinguishing characteristics about algae is that it grows fast, and it seems that may be true as well for the algae biomass industry in San Diego.

After reporting last month about a push to establish a multimillion-dollar hub for algae-based biofuels research in San Diego, I learned of a related effort with a broader focus that is known simply as “the regional algae initiative.”

While the initiative includes San Diego’s growing mini-cluster of algae-based biofuels startups, project manager Rick Halperin told me yesterday the concept extends beyond biofuels to all things algal. Halperin says the effort also plans to rely on a recent macro-economic study on “mega-region” economic development that identifies ways in which groups in San Diego and Imperial Counties can collaborate.

Imperial County, which borders Mexico between San Diego County and Arizona, consists of 4,597 square miles of mostly parched terrain. Agriculture has traditionally dominated the Imperial Valley’s economy, but close to 20 percent of the county’s 145,000 residents live near poverty and the December unemployment rate of 22.6 percent is likely the highest in California. Yet Halperin and others see the sun-baked county, which is increasingly being viewed as a paradise for renewable energy, as an ideal hotbed for growing algae in all its multipurpose forms.

“The idea for a regional algae initiative is relatively virtual,” Halperin told me. The initiative is not intended to become a formal entity, or as Halperin put it, “A Roman slave ship where everybody has to grab an oar and pull in the same direction.”

Rather, the initiative is intended to encourage collaboration, for example, by developing and sharing information on sources of government grants and other public funding for algae-based projects that span the continuum from laboratory to construction of large-scale plants. “We’re trying to be very cross-disciplinary in our approach to all this,” Halperin says. “The regional algae initiative is part cheerleading and part figuring out what needs to get done and what needs to get cleared out of our path.”

Apart from using algae to produce biofuels, Halperin says the potential uses for algae are legion. New technologies are being developed in San Diego that use algae to produce methane gas for electric power plants—and as algal pond filters capable of absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from the same power plants. New technologies that use algae to process and cleanse sewage wastewater also could prove helpful to the City of San Diego, which is currently operating its wastewater treatment plant under an EPA waiver.

“The more you can combine your industry initiatives with solutions that address some other problems, the better your chance of getting funding,” Halperin says.

Groups supporting the intiative include San Diego startups like Sapphire Energy that are focused on developing algae-based technologies, government contractors, as well as industry groups like Cleantech San Diego, and economic development organizations in San Diego and Imperial Valley. Halperin says financial support from Bank of America’s “sustainability initiative” launched the effort last year. Halperin, a San Diego consultant who has worked for the Nature Conservancy, American Wind Energy Association and Renewable Energy Institute was hired as project manager.

Part of the regional algae initiative calls for local companies to share information about their research and development efforts as part of a regular “commercialization of algae seminars.” For example, Kent BioEnergy is scheduled to make a noon presentation in Hubbs Hall today at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography about its work with Clemson University in developing microalgal-based water treatment techniques. The San Diego company says it has progressed from using algae in finfish aquaculture to increasingly complex technologies, such as using algal biomass to fuel power plants.

“For all the excitement we feel about this,” Halperin says, “We’re also really committed to trying to keep the hype level down.”

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When I sat down recently with Mario Larach, he was still excited about a U.S. Department of Energy workshop he had attended on algae biofuels earlier this month at the University of Maryland. As the co-founder of a local biofuel startup called Kai BioEnergy, Larach has been tracking a nationwide surge of interest in algae-to-biofuel technology as he seeks venture funding for his company.

It’s an exciting idea—producing fuel from pond scum—but it has some practical problems that Larach and others are still trying to solve. A key issue, underscored in this DOE fact sheet, is that algal biofuels produced in large volumes with today’s technology would cost more than $8 a gallon at the gas pump, based on conservative estimates. Larach told me a lot of people in the field have been using “photobioreactors” and transparent piping systems to grow algae, which are both costly to set up and to operate. “The gurus in the space say the only way to do this economically is to grow algae in open space,” in shallow ponds, Larach says.

The DOE has identified a variety of areas where advances are needed, including algal-biofuels process research, production, and integration, not to mention scaling up pilot plants and demonstration projects to industrial operations. Larach says growing a particular species of algae in open ponds poses other problems. One is the challenge of eliminating “weed algae” that seems to infiltrate ponds. Another stems from often-strident ecological and political opposition to projects that call for cultivating a genetically modified algae in open ponds.

For the record, Larach says Kai BioEnergy has been using only native strains of algae in developing its biofuel technology. Still, he says, “Right now, GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have a lot of issues, including EPA issues,” referring to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Solving such issues won’t be simple, but Larach says San Diego is emerging as a capital for algae-to-biofuels technology. “If you did a map of the world in terms of where all the activity and the microalgae breakthroughs are, it’s right here,” Larach says. His list of San Diego’s expertise includes:

—Stephen Mayfield, a cell biologist at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla who also is a co-founder of Sapphire Energy, which established its corporate headquarters in San Diego (read on for more on Sapphire).

—B. Gregory Mitchell, another scientist who is regarded as a leader in …Next Page »

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It was the week before Christmas, and the deals were flying. Could San Diego’s economy be downturn defying? Heed the tech news and be of good cheer! We wish you an Xconomy Xmas and Xponential New Year!

—The big deal of the week came Wednesday, when Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT) exercised its option to acquire Ibis Biosciences from Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) for $215 million—plus continuing payments from sales of Ibis’ diagnostics products.

—San Diego’s Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: LGND) also scored with a big pharma partner, GlaxoSmithKline, (NYSE: GSK) by awarding exclusive rights to Glaxo for its drug candidate shown recently to effectively boost blood platelet cells. Glaxo agreed to pay $5 million now and as much as $158 million later, not including royalty payments.

—San Diego’s Solera Holdings, which makes software for the auto claims industry, announced it has paid $117.4 million to buy HPI Ltd, a British firm that compiles a data base of used car histories. Solera was founded in 2005 by Tony Aquila, a former president of Mitchell International, a rival auto claims software developer also based in San Diego.

—San Diego’s Huntington Capital raised $78 million in capital commitments for its second fund, which the boutique venture lender launched in May. The firm hopes to raise a total of $100 million for “Fund II” by early next year.

—Privately held Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, NV, completed its buyout of SpaceDev, which is based in the suburban San Diego community of Poway, in a deal estimated at roughly $30 million. SpaceDev said its shareholders approved the deal Monday.

—Ardea Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker: RDEA]]), the San Diego biotech developing small molecule drugs for inflammatory diseases, raised more than $30 million in a private stock placement.

—Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), sensing new opportunities in stem cell research for treating diabetes, formed a two-year collaboration with San Diego’s Novocell.

—Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, who made his fortune as the founder of MP3.com, launched a new version of Gizmo5 technology at SIPphone. The new technology, GizmoCall.com, enables users to log onto a Web site to make VOIP calls (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and can be used with any computer running a Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating system.

—Finally, the government awarded a couple of noteworthy contracts this week to San Diego’s SAIC, (NYSE: SAI) the research and engineering company also known as Science Applications International Corp. The first, from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was for a $14.9 million biofuel contract to develop ways of using algae to make JP-8 grade jet fuel. The second deal, from NASA, could be worth as much as $69 million over the next five years to SAIC for engineering services and support for the Constellation program, which calls for returning astronauts to the moon.

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It turns out that DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D funding agency, awarded two biofuel development contracts last week, and both went to San Diego companies. As we reported, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $19.5 million contract to a consortium headed by General Atomics. Yesterday, the Pentagon said DARPA also awarded a $14.9 million contract to SAIC, the engineering and research company. Both contracts call for developing economical methods for making JP-8 grade jet fuel from algae.

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Sapphire Energy has not provided many details about its technology since CEO Jason Pyle stepped into the limelight six months ago to announce the San Diego startup has developed a revolutionary process for turning pond scum into high-octane gasoline.

“I have no intention of being secretive,” Pyle told me at the inaugural networking meeting of the newly formed San Diego Biotechnology Network, or SDBN. But after seeing the effects of the boom-and-bust cycle in two recent tech bubbles, Pyle says, “My goal is to maintain a serious and thoughtful approach in a frothy market. I don’t want Sapphire to get caught up in that hype.”

Keeping the media from hyperventilating, however, could be a tall order for a company developing technology with the potential to help the United States break its dependence on imported crude oil. And who can blame us?

At a time when U.S. gasoline prices were arcing beyond $4 a gallon nationwide, Sapphire said it had proven the feasibility of using algae to make “green crude” that can serve as an identical substitute for crude oil. Sapphire said its product, unlike other biofuels, could enter the pipeline at any petroleum refinery for processing into gasoline and other fuels.

The company calls it “the world’s first renewable gasoline.”

Sapphire’s process has been used successfully to make the three most important fuels, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, Pyle says, and all three products have been independently certified to meet fuel standards set by the American Society for Testing and Materials.

The prospects are electrifying, and interest in Sapphire has been extraordinarily high. Sapphire only added fuel to the fire, so to speak, when the company said in September it had raised $100 million in a second venture round from Bill Gates, Arch Venture Partners and others.

Aside from Sapphire’s corporate pedigree and the revolutionary potential of its technology, the company says its green crude is environmentally appealing because it will have no effect on global climate change. Sapphire says it’s technology is “carbon neutral” because its algae absorbs as much carbon dioxide as a car releases when its fueled by renewable gasoline.

In San Diego, Sapphire has been recruiting heavily for chemical engineers, lipids chemists, senior algal production scientists and other skilled workers at its headquarters on Torrey Pines Mesa. The startup currently has about 80 employees, Pyle said.

Sapphire’s CEO remained vague, though, about details of the company’s technology.

“We use genetic engineering, directed evolution, synthetic biology and (agricultural) breeding,” Pyle told me. But Sapphire’s approach specifically does not include fermentation, a technique adopted by some biofuels startups.

“All of our systems are photosynthetic,” Pyle says about a process in which algae “directly converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon products.”

Sapphire already has demonstrated that its technology is feasible, and is now working to show it also can work on an industrial scale, Pyle says.

“We’ve proven this from sunlight-to-gasoline, from soup-to-nuts, so we don’t have any questions about whether the technology works. The only question is about the cost of production.”

He adds that Sapphire’s near-term goals “are to test our existing organisms and to grow those organisms in pilot plants into green crude on a scale larger than we have here in San Diego.”

The company has established a test facility in Las Cruces, N.M., and has been drawing on the scientific resources of New Mexico State University to help develop its fuels.

In an interesting twist, Pyle says the origins of Sapphire began two years ago as …Next Page »

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Algae-based biofuels are the topic du jour. And why not—the prospect of using pond scum to power 21st-century transportation and replace crude oil is pretty appealing. So one of the highlights from the Algae Biomass Summit in Seattle yesterday, besides the keynote by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, was a panel of prominent VCs discussing the ins and outs of the fledgling biofuels business. Bob Nelsen, a co-founder and managing director at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners, was joined by Jim Long, a venture partner at Redwood Shores, CA-based Gabriel Venture Partners, and moderator Josh Green, a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, CA.

Nelsen and Long plugged their portfolio companies in the algae space, of course, but they also engaged Green in a fascinating conversation about biofuels strategy and challenges. Green himself has no investments in algal fuels, but he’s open to the idea— “I’m agnostic, not an atheist,” he said. “But it’s late to get into algal fuels. The bar for differentiation has been raised, so you have to have something special.”

Nelsen (who’s an Xconomist) certainly thinks he has something special. He serves as a director of Sapphire Energy, a San Diego-based algae biofuel startup that has more than $100 million in the bank, and “anticipates commitments for future funds that are quite large,” Nelsen says. In addition to Arch Ventures, Sapphire is backed by Bill Gates, Venrock, and Wellcome Trust. “We want to create the market leader based on a real technological advantage,” says Nelsen. “We’re going to replace oil. It’s a grand goal.”

Meanwhile, Long is chairman of the board of Aurora Biofuels, an Alameda, CA-based startup out of UC Berkeley that uses genetically modified algae to create biodiesel. In addition to Gabriel Venture Partners, it is backed by Noventi and Oak Investment Partners.

So, apart from their respective bets, how do they think algae biofuel companies should differentiate themselves from the competition? Nelsen provided some high-level context. “You will see a couple high-profile [startups] from people who didn’t get into the initial party. We’re excited because we’ll be ahead. There will be many winners in this space.” He pointed out several ways for companies to …Next Page »

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This afternoon, I’ve been attending the second annual Algae Biomass Summit at the Bell Harbor Conference Center down by the waterfront in Seattle. This year’s conference has drawn 600 participants—who knew the algae community was this big already? Here at Xconomy, we’ve covered some algae biofuel startups with local connections, including AXI out of the University of Washington, and San Diego-based Sapphire Energy, whose investors include Arch Venture Partners and Bill Gates’s firm, Cascade Investment.

After a fascinating panel discussion on algae-based biofuels (more on that soon), it was time for the keynote address, by Vinod Khosla. Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a venture partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and founder of Khosla Ventures. A Silicon Valley celebrity, Khosla has invested in a number of cleantech and energy startups, mostly in ethanol and next-generation fuels (Gevo, KiOR, Amyris, LS9) and fuel-efficiency technologies (Transonic Combustion, Ecomotors).

Khosla is an interesting guy to be speaking here, because he hasn’t invested in algae—at least not yet. There has been some speculation that he’s looking into it more seriously these days. “I’m here because I believe in the potential of algae,” Khosla told the packed room. “We’ve looked at maybe 100 different plans on algae in the last few years.” One topic he wanted to cover was what factors would make him invest in algae as an alternative fuel technology.

He set the stage with some energy context. “It’s not cleantech that’s interesting, it’s ‘main tech,’” he said. By this he meant the huge, billion-dollar markets provided by traditional industries such as engines, lighting, applicances, batteries, cement, water, glass, gasoline, diesel, and power generation. To address these markets, whether you’re looking at algae biofuels or other technologies, he said, you need …Next Page »

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Algae-based biofuel is getting pretty big—at least as an investment. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that San Diego-based Sapphire Energy has closed a round of venture financing from Bill Gates’s investment arm, Kirkland, WA-based Cascade Investment. Sapphire Energy, which is working on oil-producing algae, has now raised a total of $100 million, and is also backed by Arch Venture Partners, Venrock, and Wellcome Trust.

In addition to its Seattle-area backing, Sapphire has some Seattle competition. Last month, we reported on the algae-biofuel startup AXI, which was spun out of the University of Washington and seeded by Allied Minds of Quincy, MA. It will be interesting to see whether either company is able to zero in on the right strain of algae, and produce oil at costs competitive with crude oil.

According to the WSJ, Sapphire is working towards a 10,000-barrel-a-day algae-based oil facility, and can now concentrate on production and engineering problems. Meanwhile, Gates’s involvement may signal a broader interest in alternative biofuels. Earlier this year, Cascade Investment sold its stake in Pacific Ethanol. The Journal also notes that Vinod Khosla, who has invested previously in ethanol ventures, is giving a keynote talk at the Algae Biomass Summit next month. And Xconomy has extensively covered the saga of Greenfuel Technologies, the Cambridge, MA, startup headed by Polaris Ventures partner Bob Metcalfe, that is reportedly overcoming early technical problems at its algae farm in Arizona. Perhaps it’s time to hedge some bets.

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It may be the dog days of August—a sweltering, 90-degree weekend in the Northwest?— but there was still a trickle of action last week in biotech, biofuels, and software. We’ll see if the deals start to pick up this week, with the rain and cooler temperatures.

—Accelerator, the Seattle-based biotech incubator, has formed a new startup called Mirina. The exact investment amount has not been announced, but it’s in the range of $1.6 million to $5 million. Mirina will develop drugs to block microRNAs, molecules that could control gene networks. Possible targets include cancer, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders.

—AXI, a Seattle-area biofuels startup, announced its launch with seed funding from Allied Minds, a Massachusetts-based investment firm focused on early-stage technologies from academic labs. AXI was spawned from research on oil-producing algae in the lab of University of Washington biologist Rose Ann Cattolico.

—1Cast, an online news and information delivery service based in Kirkland, WA, raised its first round of funding, led by Eagle River Holdings. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but 1Cast is expected to launch a beta version of its Web service this year.

—Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners have co-invested in an $8.5 million Series B round for Connecticut-based InstallFree, which makes virtualization software for large corporate and government customers. Richard Fade, a partner at Ignition, says virtualization could “fundamentally remake the fabric of computing and software.”

—PATH, the Seattle nonprofit backed by the Gates Foundation, is set to expand its distribution of Vitamin-A fortified “Ultra Rice” to combat malnutrition in Brazil, Colombia, China, and India. The Ultra Rice technology originated with James and Duffy Cox, father-and-son inventors at Bellingham, WA-based Bon Dente International.

—Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN) has moved forward with a couple of small clinical trials of Provenge, an immunotherapy treatment for prostate cancer. The Seattle biotech company has begun enrolling patients in its NeoACT trial, which will involve 40 patients at University of California, San Francisco, with localized prostate cancer. Another clinical trial of Provenge, called ProACT, is expected to begin later this month; the multi-center trial involves 120 patients with metastatic prostate cancer.

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