[Corrected: 7:26 am Pacific, 11/12/09] San Diego-based Altair Therapeutics, a company developing inhalable drugs to block inflammatory proteins involved in asthma and other respiratory diseases, has closed on the second part of a Series A venture financing, meaning it has raised a total of $17 million this year. [An earlier version said the company has raised $17 million since inception, but that tally didn't count an undisclosed seed investment].

Domain Associates led the latest investment round, and AgeChem Venture Fund joined previous investors Thomas, McNerney & Partners, Forward Ventures, and the group that spun out Altair’s technology in the first place—Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS). Altair plans to use the cash to finish a mid-stage clinical trial of 30 asthma patients who will be randomly assigned to get the company’s AIR645 drug candidate, or a placebo.

Altair actually got started two years ago by Isis and Thomas McNerney. The idea was to see if Altair could apply the things Isis knew about gene-silencing technology, known as antisense, as an inhalable drug for respiratory diseases. The concept was an offshoot that wasn’t part of Isis’ core portfolio of drugs for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The idea was to make this inhaled antisense drug block a couple of inflammatory proteins that are implicated in asthma attacks—IL-4 and IL-13. The company says it has found some surprisingly encouraging results in early human tests on about 80 people. If that can be confirmed in subsequent trials, it could offer a new treatment option for a disease that affects about one out of every 18 people in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health.

“This is a great opportunity for antisense drugs,” said CEO Joel Martin, when I visited his office a few weeks ago. On the statement announcing today’s financing, he added: “We are thrilled.”

The Altair story really began in October 2007, around the same time another company spun out of Isis, called Excaliard Pharmaceuticals. In the case of Altair, Susan Gregory was the inventor and champion of the asthma drug’s prospects inside Isis. She ended up spinning the technology outside the company with help from Pratik Shah, a partner with Thomas McNerney. The deal was structured so that Isis would own 18 percent of the new company in preferred stock, and it stands to receive development milestones and royalties if Altair is successful.

Martin, one of the early scientists at Isis, first got exposed to the technology while he was still a partner with Forward Ventures in San Diego. He left Forward in October 2008, and liked what he saw at one of its portfolio companies, Altair, that he personally joined as CEO in May.

Ivor Royston, a partner with Forward and a member of Altair’s board, told my colleague Bruce Bigelow yesterday that he considers Altair an obvious pick for the portfolio.

“Even in the worst market, with the most restricted kind of financing, this would be a good investment,” Royston says. “This company is in the sweet spot for any venture capital firm.”

Altair sees plenty of room in the market for a new asthma drug. People use inhaled …Next Page »

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Pulmatrix, the Lexington, MA-based company working to stop infectious bugs from being absorbed into the lungs, has raised $30.2 million in a Series B venture round to advance its unorthodox method for treating and preventing respiratory diseases like flu, the company is announcing today.

Arch Venture Partners and Novartis Bioventures Fund co-led the new financing, and were joined by the company’s existing investors, Polaris Venture Partners and 5AM Ventures. On top of that, Pulmatrix is raking in another $2.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to advance its research with broad potential against multiple strains of seasonal and pandemic flu.

The big idea at Pulmatrix, which has its origins in the labs of MIT’s Robert Langer and Harvard University’s David Edwards, has the potential to fundamentally challenge the tradition of antiviral treatment. Instead of engineering a drug to kill a single virus, which the pathogen can resist over time, Pulmatrix is developing a method to stop any strain of invader that might embed in the lungs. Pulmatrix is trying to do this by creating aerosols that contain positively charged ion-based compounds, like calcium and magnesium. These compounds are first supposed to stimulate immune defenses to prevent infection. But beyond that, the Pulmatrix drugs are supposed to alter the viscosity of the mucus that lines the lungs, which activates proteins to form 3-D matrices that create a firewall of sorts, blocking pathogens of any kind from burrowing deep into lung tissue.

“Think of it as like a river with a light coating of ice on top, but with the river flowing smoothly underneath,” said Pulmatrix CEO Robert Connelly, in an Xconomy interview in June. “It’s more difficult to penetrate the surface top layer, and there’s still clearance below.”

Back in June, Connelly said that evidence from animal and early human studies showed the company’s method hasn’t gummed up the mucus lining of the lungs, which could make it harder to breathe, or worse, create a haven for infectious bugs to thrive.

Pulmatrix plans to use the new money to finance “multiple clinical trials” in 2010 and 2011 against a number of respiratory diseases, according to a company statement. Pulmatrix currently has a drug candidate called PUR003 that’s being tested in an early-to-mid stage clinical trial against flu, and it expects preliminary results by the end of this year. The company plans to start an asthma trial by the end of this year, and is also pursuing a treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—an umbrella term for emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

In connection with the financing, Pulmatrix has added Steve Gillis of Arch Venture Partners and Lauren Silverman of Novartis Venture Funds to its board.

“We believe that Pulmatrix’s therapies are uniquely positioned to address respiratory diseases in a fundamentally new way which could result in game changing improvements in the lives of patients with many different types of respiratory diseases,” Silverman said in a statement.

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London-based drug giant AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) plans to eliminate 113 jobs at its Westborough, MA, plant next month due to generic drug competition for its asthma drug budesonide (Plumicourt), the Boston Globe reports. Our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly. AstraZeneca also has a large R&D operation in Waltham, MA, where the company recently completed a major expansion to its facilities, according to the newspaper.

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Back in September, I wrote in this space that if a global flu pandemic ever strikes, public health officials might turn to a Lexington, MA-based startup company called Pulmatrix.

The pandemic (a bit overblown, I must say) did strike. And yes, the public health officials have been calling Pulmatrix.

This company’s technology is nowhere near ready for prime time in big clinical trials, much less the marketplace, so isn’t all the fuss a bit premature? Maybe. Then again, most biotech companies work on pretty incremental advances over the standards of care, but Pulmatrix is one of those rare beasts that has a chance to transform how physicians think about treating many major respiratory diseases. The technology has attracted $18 million in initial equity financing from Polaris Venture Partners and 5AM Ventures, and a scientific advisory board that includes David Edwards of Harvard University and Robert Langer of MIT. It’s been a few months since we last wrote about this company, so I got an update from CEO Bob Connelly.

The concept at Pulmatrix challenges the status quo of antiviral treatment, in which a drug is engineered to kill a single infectious invader, which works for a while until that virus inevitably uses its evolutionary tricks to develop resistance. This is the “one drug, one bug,” method, as Pulmatrix puts it. Instead of going that route, Pulmatrix is developing a technique that’s supposed to stop any pathogen or flu strain that might find its way into the lungs. It calls this the “one drug, multiple bug” approach.

“The single drug for multiple bug approach is what’s really generating a lot of attention for us, even though we’ve been keeping a low profile,” Connelly says.

Pulmatrix is trying to do this by creating aerosols that have positively-charged ion-based compounds, like calcium and magnesium, that would be sprayed into the lungs. These compounds are supposed to do a couple of things. First, they stimulate immune defenses to prevent infection. Second, the aerosols are supposed to change the viscosity of the mucus that lines the lungs, which activates proteins in the lungs to form 3-D matrices that create a firewall of sorts that blocks pathogens of any kind from burrowing deep into lung tissue. So far, in animal and early human studies, this method hasn’t gummed up the mucus lining of the lungs, which could make it harder to breathe, or worse, create a haven for infectious bugs to thrive.

“Think of it as like a river with a light coating of ice on top, but with the river flowing smoothly underneath,” Connelly says. “It’s more difficult to penetrate the surface top layer, and there’s still clearance below.”

What’s more, Pulmatrix is supposed to change the properties of the airways, so that when people breathe in a pathogen—like swine flu—it doesn’t form into those tiny droplets that people can sneeze …Next Page »

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Even though many venture firms are scrimping, there’s hope for biotech startups in search of capital to fund bold new areas of biological research. NKT Therapeutics, which revealed its $8 million first-round financing in March, has rallied venture capitalists to back its efforts to develop drugs that target lesser-known immune cells that potentially play key roles in asthma, cancer, and a bevy of other major illnesses. Robert Mashal, CEO of the Newton, MA-based startup, filled me on how the firm is channeling its funds into the novel science.

NKT is developing biological treatments to interact with natural killer T cells (or NKT cells), a class of white blood cells, which have a growing following in both scientific and industry circles for their potential to lead to the discovery of new drugs. Though there are drugs in testing that hope to stimulate NKT cells as part of a multi-pronged immune response, no drug that exclusively targets NKT immune cells is in clinical trials or has a track record with the FDA, Mashal says. Thus, NKT Therapeutics has embarked on a biotech journey with both great challenges and great possibilities.

Despite the hurdles ahead, the startup has a deep understanding of NKT cell biology that comes from its founding researchers—Steve Balk, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Mark Exley, of Harvard Medical School, and Brian Wilson, at Massachusetts General Hospital—who are experts in the field (they’ve also been research collaborators for years prior to founding the startup in early 2008.) Specifically, the startup has an antibody that is designed to home in on a cellular receptor—a type of protein marker on the surface of cells—it believes is unique to many NKT cells.

The firm plans to initially develop the antibody to block the function of NKT cells in patients with asthma. Research has found that removing NKT cells from genetically engineered mice quells their asthma, Mashal says, and mice or monkeys do have asthmatic responses when NKT cells are activated in their lungs. Yet the firm is about a year and a half to two years from testing the antibody in human clinical trials, he adds.

“If this therapeutic does in humans what it does in animals, then we’ve got a good drug,” Mashal says. “I think that’s the biggest ‘if’ in the industry, and until you do the trials to test that, you never really know.”

The firm’s biotech drug could be especially useful for severe cases of …Next Page »

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San Diego’s Altair Therapeutics today named former Forward Ventures partner Joel Martin as president and CEO. Martin, who left the San Diego life sciences VC firm in October, was previously a co-founder of Avant BioVentures. Altair’s current CEO Paul Brennan will continue working with the company. Privately held Altair, which was founded in 2007, develops therapeutics for respiratory diseases like asthma and rhinitis. Its first compound, an inhaled new class drug, is in Phase 1 clinical trials.

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Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals has raised $30 million in a second round of venture capital to support its growing pipeline of drugs for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The venture financing is the second-biggest of the year in the Seattle life sciences cluster, behind the $40 million raised in March by Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies.

Calistoga got the vote of confidence from the same people who invested in its $21 million Series A round two years ago—Frazier Healthcare Ventures, Alta Partners, Three Arch Partners, and Amgen Ventures.

The company has been able to defy the gravity of the downturn because it is hitting its drug development milestones ahead of schedule, and it is pursuing one of the hottest targets in cancer biology of the moment. It’s called the PI3 kinase pathway, which controls critical cell processes like proliferation, migration, and cell survival. When these normal functions get flipped into an overactive mode, it’s a hallmark of cancer cells growing out of control as well as an immune system going haywire and attacking healthy tissue.

Calistoga was born in 2006 when it licensed technology from Bothell, WA-based Icos to develop drugs that hit this target. The company is up against some formidable competition in this cancer category, with GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche, and Exelixis, to name a few. Yet Calistoga claims to be different because its drugs are aimed to hit more specific types of PI3 kinase, including one known as the delta isoform. This means Calistoga’s drug may have a better profile for blood cancers that express this variety of the PI3 kinase, and it may have milder side effects that would make this drug useful for chronic conditions like inflammatory diseases, says CEO Carol Gallagher.

“This will give us some wind in our sails as we advance these programs,” Gallagher says. “It’s great in a difficult financing environment to get a signal from our investors that they have confidence.”

The financing enables Calistoga to keep building up a pipeline of experimental drugs, so that a year from now it expects to have three different drugs in clinical trials. The new financing means Calistoga has enough cash to operate through 2010, although Gallagher wouldn’t be more specific because the cash burn rate will depend on how fast it decides to push drugs through clinical trials. Calistoga, which has 22 employees, is planning to conserve this capital carefully from the start—it doesn’t plan …Next Page »

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San Diego-based Axikin Pharmaceuticals has reeled in $3 million in a first round of venture financing to advance its young pipeline of drugs to treat respiratory and inflammatory diseases. The investors are Sanderling Ventures, which has offices in San Diego and San Mateo, CA, and Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners in New York, according to a company announcement.

Axikin was spun out from San Diego-based Actimis Pharmaceuticals in June 2008, when the latter company agreed to sell its lead experimental asthma drug to German drug-maker Boehringer Ingetheim in a structured buyout valued at $515 million.

Like Actimis, Axikin is developing small molecule drugs to treat respiratory disorders such as asthma, allergic rhinitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Yet Axikin says that its molecules could have broader applications in inflammatory diseases like inflammatory dermatoses, inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as in cancer.

Axikin President Kevin Bacon says in a statement that the company plans to ask the FDA for permission to begin its first human clinical trial in the “very near future.” He did not identify which drug is its leading candidate.

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KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, a South San Francisco-based biotech company, said today it has raised $12 million in the second closing of a $32 million Series D round of venture financing. Baxter International, Genzyme Ventures, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital were among the investors in the round. The company is developing a human antibody fragment to fight bacterial infections in cystic fibrosis patients, as well as another candidate for autoimmune diseases like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

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Everywhere he goes in biotechnology circles, RXi Pharmaceuticals’ CEO Tod Woolf hears the same criticism of RNA interference drugs. What can be done to overcome the challenge with drug delivery?

The answer is, nobody knows until it’s been proven with an effective drug. But Worcester, MA-based RXi (NASDAQ: RXII) says it has obtained the exclusive right to technology from the University of Massacusetts Medical School which could hold the key for the first way to deliver these drugs through the mouth.

The problem of how to deliver RNA interference drugs has been around since the technique was co-discovered a decade ago by one of RXi’s founders, UMass researcher Craig Mello. These drugs are thought to have the advantage of being able to specifically hit targets on cells that other drugs can’t, and to get at the genetic root cause of disease. The problem is that small interfering RNA drugs can get chewed up by enzymes in the body, or flushed through the kidneys into the urine long before they ever get to the diseased cells, Woolf says.

Other companies, like Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) are packaging the RNAi molecules along with other materials, like polymers, fat droplets called liposomes, or nanoparticles that will make them stable long enough in the blood to do their business, Woolf says. Researchers have also tried localized delivery to tissues like the lungs, a joint, or the eyes.

“A lot of people talk about delivery, delivery, delivery,” Woolf says. “We’ll all be working on this for the next 20 years.”

There doesn’t appear to be one silver-bullet answer for drug delivery. Woolf says RXi now believes the best delivery method will vary from tissue to tissue, disease to disease.

In RXi’s case, it is testing out an oral pill in animals that could work for inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, atherosclerosis, and Type 2 diabetes. This approach is unusual, because most companies have long believed oral delivery of RNA interference drugs was impossible, Woolf says. …Next Page »

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Calistoga Pharmaceuticals is growing up. The Seattle biotech company, which raised its founding $21 million round in March 2007, is announcing today it has hired its first CEO, Carol Gallagher, an executive who led the Rituxan oncology team at Biogen Idec when it crossed the $1 billion mark in sales.

I stopped by Calistoga’s offices in Belltown to interview Gallagher and the company’s president and founder, Michael Gallatin. My goals were to find out what kind of situation Gallagher is entering at Calistoga, who she is, and how she plans to steer this company so it can someday come up with another hit drug like Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“We’re at a real inflection point, and we need to make sure we have someone who can take us in the right direction,” says Gallatin, the former chief scientific officer of Icos. “She’s a fantastic addition to the team. She’s got a lot of energy—not that I don’t—but there’s a lot of vitality there.”

Gallagher, 44, is a newcomer to Seattle. She has a doctorate in pharmacy from the University of Kentucky, and a resume with commercial experience at Big Pharma (Pfizer), Big Biotech (Biogen Idec) and small biotechs, most recently as CEO of Metastatix, an Atlanta, GA-based cancer drug developer.

Calistoga got its start in 2006, when Gallatin obtained a license to technology that his former employer, Icos, had left on the shelf while it put its resources into marketing the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis. Gallatin left Icos in 2005 to join Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Ventures as a venture partner, a job he still holds. It wasn’t too long before Calistoga scored financing from Frazier, Alta Partners, Three Arch Partners, and Amgen Ventures.

The goal here is to develop conventional small-molecule drugs that block a specific marker inside cells called the PI3 kinase pathway. This pathway’s job is to stimulate a bunch of cell processes like proliferation, growth, migration, metabolism, and cell survival. Research has shown that when they are switched into an overactive mode, they can play a key role in diseases like blood cancers and autoimmune diseases like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. The tricky part is that these same functions can be essential for healthy, normal cells—so a drug that completely knocks out all varieties of this pathway could have serious side effects.

Calistoga thinks its secret sauce is biology that says if you block a specific type of PI3 kinase, called the delta isoform (which only appears on certain blood cells), then you can have the therapeutic benefit without potential for side effects from drugs that block a broader spectrum of PI3 kinase types.

The PI3 kinase pathway is a hot topic in the biotech industry, because of the role it appears to play in many cancers, and has generated interest from a number of companies. The list includes Swiss drug giant Novartis, South San Francisco-based Exelixis, and San Diego-based Intellikine, Gallatin says.

What makes Calistoga different is its specific focus on the delta form of PI3 kinase, and that it is the first group to take such a targeted drug into clinical trials, he says.

Hiring someone like Gallagher now is important at this moment for Calistoga, because it has its first clinical trials ongoing in Phase I for B-cell cancers like chronic lymphocytic leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and it needs someone to lead its clinical trial and commercial strategy, Gallatin says.

The strategy is already taking shape. …Next Page »

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MPM Capital has grown into such a colossal healthcare venture fund, it makes people who follow the industry (like me) wonder whether it can stay true to its roots. The fund, with $2.5 billion under management, has a tradition of making seed-stage bets in startup biotech companies, including winners like Cambridge, MA-based Idenix (NASDAQ: IDIX). But to keep the returns growing as stakes get higher, it has put money to work in a world further removed from cutting-edge innovation and seed-stage ventures, with investments in biotech stocks with late-stage product candidates that can pay off promptly, and big.

I stopped by MPM’s perch on the 54th floor of the John Hancock Tower in Boston recently to hear more about how it plans to balance early innovation with later-stage candidates that can generate quicker returns. I spoke with John Vander Vort, the firm’s chief operating officer and managing director, and Kazumi Shiosaki, a managing director and former leader of scientific development at Millennium Pharmaceuticals.

MPM, which raised its most recent $550 million fund in 2007, is designed to be a “soup to nuts” investor, spreading its bets on a mix of startups through late-stage growth equities, Vander Vort says. It aims to allocate about 75 percent to 80 percent of its capital to biotech investments, and the rest to medical devices. The strategy is to invest $20 million to $30 million per company, in 15 to 22 companies, Vander Vort says. For the fund to be successful, it should deliver “a handful” of companies that generate returns of 5 times to 15 times greater than its initial investment, and some that return 2 to 5 times the original investment, Vander Vort says. “Obviously you have some klinkers too,” he says.

Still, when MPM announced its new fund in March 2007, it didn’t make it sound like it was patiently putting money into cutting-edge companies and waiting a decade or so for them to bear fruit, if they ever did. Instead, it pointed to how a couple of stocks helped it deliver double-digit positive returns in the first few quarters of the fund’s life.

That may have contributed to a misperception in the market about MPM, Shiosaki says. “Because we’re a large fund, people think it’s only about late-stage investing. We really focus and invest heavily in innovation. There’s actually a requirement in our portfolio to have high-risk, highly innovative, no-one-else-has-seen-it-yet kind of companies,” she says.

Interestingly, MPM’s formula puts about 60 percent of the fund in late-stage investments, while a hefty 40 percent is steered into startup companies, Vander Vort says. Since the fund elected last year not to continue funding the Seattle-based Accelerator—a successful incubator for small, leading edge biotech companies—I figured that placing those smaller bets may just not generate the kind of financial returns a big fund like MPM needs to survive.

Not so, says Shiosaki. MPM keeps its eyes open for big ideas in biology that are …Next Page »

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Idera Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge, MA-based developer of treatments for autoimmune and infectious diseases, said today it has received an undisclosed milestone payment from drug giant Novartis. Idera (NASDAQ: IDPH) received the payment because Novartis started an early-stage clinical trial of QAX935, a drug that stimulates Toll-Like Receptor 9. The companies entered a partnership in June 2005 to develop drugs against TLR9 for asthma and allergies. Idera stock fell 2 percent to $14.34 at 10:33 a.m. Eastern time today.

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Abbie Celniker has been climbing biotech’s corporate ladder for much of her career. Higher and higher she went, in senior R&D jobs at Genentech, Wyeth Biopharma, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and most recently as global head of Novartis Biologics in Cambridge, MA. Now, at 49, she has taken a detour to become CEO of a growing startup company in Cambridge called Taligen Therapeutics.

At big companies, the higher Celniker climbed, the further she got from her roots as a molecular biologist. “At a large pharma company, you’re managing or directing things at such a high level, you couldn’t really see things at a level where you’re exposed to the science anymore,” Celniker says. “I fell in love with the science they have here.”

Taligen, she explained to me recently, is developing drugs for inflammatory diseases that work in a new way, by controlling the “alternative pathway of complement”—a part of the immune system that helps initiate and amplify inflammation. The approach is different than that of other protein drugs that work further “downstream” in the chain of inflammatory events, like Amgen’s arthritis drug Enbrel or Biogen Idec and Elan’s multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease treatment, Tysabri, she says. Intervening earlier in the complicated cascade of events, the reasoning goes, could better control inflammation.

Whenever a drug sets out to tamp down an excessive immune reaction, though, researchers have to worry about going too far, and making the body vulnerable to infection. (Tysabri, for example, has been linked to a potentially fatal brain infection called PML.) Taligen’s drugs may have an advantage here, because they can be designed to work locally just at the organ or tissue affected by an inflammatory disease, rather than acting throughout the entire body. A drug for asthma, say, could be inhaled into the lungs, or a treatment for macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, could be injected behind the eye, Celniker says.

Founded in 2004 by Woodruff Emlen and Michael Holers, professors at the University of Colorado, and working with a group of just seven people in discovery research, Taligen has built a suite of protein-based drug candidates that modify the amplification role of the alternative complement pathway. The work is still in early stages, and hasn’t yet progressed to clinical trials, yet it has attracted big money. Taligen announced in February that it had secured a $65 million Series B round of venture capital, divvied into undisclosed chunks based on hitting milestones in development. The first chunk arrived in January, led by Alta Partners and Clarus Ventures, and included existing investors Sanderlin Ventures, Tango and High Country Venture.

The cash is being used to double the size of the company, Celniker says. Taligen moved its corporate headquarters from Aurora, CO, to Cambridge last month when Celniker joined. While its discovery group will stay in Colorado, the company is looking for people in Cambridge with experience in animal testing, manufacturing for clinical trials, and early-stage development work, who are hard to find in Colorado, Celniker says. “It’s hard to build a company to make protein drugs if you’re not in the Bay Area or here,” she says. “We need people who have done it before.”

Celniker makes it sound like it won’t be too hard to find recruits. “Literally you can’t walk down the street without bumping into someone you want to consult with or hire,” she says. And at a company of Taligen’s size, Celniker will surely get to see those people, and the science they’re working on, at close range.

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Fish oil is good for you, we get it. Now we also know, thanks to scientists connected to Bedford, MA-based Resolvyx Pharmaceuticals, that if you give mice tiny doses of a fish oil derivative, you can suppress two specific proteins that play a role in asthma, and other inflammatory diseases.

Researchers at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School found that low doses of a compound known as a resolvin were able to tamp down inflammatory molecules Interleukin-23 and Interleukin-17 by more than 60 percent in mice, according to research published this week in Nature Immunology. The study, done in mice with asthma, found the drug was able to reduce the inflammation that restricts airways, even during peak inflammatory episodes, and helped the animals to breathe better than those that didn’t get the drug.

Asthma is a monster opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry, with an estimated 20 million patients in the U.S. who have various forms of the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet Jamie Nichols, Resolvyx’s executive vice president of corporate development, is careful not to pigeonhole the company’s drug as a potential asthma drug alone. The finding suggests it may also have potential for related diseases of an overactive immune system, like inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

“We need to prove this is useful in humans, and this paper makes it reasonable for asthma as a first shot,” Nichols says.

The finding paves the way for privately-held Resolvyx to start the first clinical trials of its drug, dubbed RvE1, in the first half of 2009, Nichols says. The first trial will enroll healthy volunteers on the tiniest of doses to make sure it’s safe, and then another early-stage trial will recruit about 30 to 40 patients with asthma. Patients will have their Interleukin-23 and Interleukin-17 levels monitored, and clinicians will also measure whether the drug helps patients breathe better, he said.

As David Stipp wrote for us last year, it’s conceivable that people can get the same resolvins from taking Omega-3 supplements or eating a diet rich in fish.

It’s not really practical, though, Nichols says, because the resolvin isolated by his company is 1,000 times more potent than what people can get from fish oil. The company’s chemists have found a way to synthesize the resolvin into a daily pill that delivers a low dose of a few milligrams of the active compound, Nichols says. Even though I live in the Northwest and like salmon as much as the next guy, the pill sounds a lot easier on the gullet than a daily fillet.

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