San Diego’s Lpath (OTC: LPTN), a biotech developing specialized monoclonal antibodies for cancer and other diseases, intends to raise about $10 million through a secondary offering of stock and warrants, according to a recent regulatory filing.

The company is working to advance two related drug candidates within an emerging field of medical science that targets bioactive signaling lipids, and could be used to treat a wide range of human diseases. One is a specialized formulation of the humanized monoclonal antibody sonepcizumab, which has shown promise in treating the wet form of age-related macular degeneration and other types of eye disease. The other drug candidate is a systemic formulation of sonepcizumab that Lpath was developing with Merck Serono as a potential late-stage cancer therapeutic. A third related drug candidate is in pre-clinical development.

Lpath and Merck ended their partnership in mid-2010, and Lpath says Merck has relinquished all rights to the drug. The biotech began working with Pfizer on the compound for diseases of the eye in early 2010, and Lpath later granted Pfizer a time-limited right of first refusal for its cancer drug candidate.

Lpath says it has financed its operations mostly through the private placement of equity and debt securities, and funding from corporate partners pursuant to research and development collaboration agreements. The company says it intends to use the net proceeds of the $10 million offering for general corporate purposes.

At the end of September, Lpath had an accumulated deficit of just over $36 million. The company says its costs for continuing research and development, including general operations, should be about $20 million to $30 million through the end of next year.

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San Diego’s Tracon Pharmaceuticals says today it has raised $14 million of a planned $22 million round of venture capital needed to advance development of TRC105, a promising therapeutic that inhibits the growth of new blood vessels that supply tumors. The National Cancer Institute also is supporting the company’s research and development, which includes ongoing trials in prostate, bladder, and liver cancer.

JAFCO, the Tokyo-based, publicly traded venture capital group, and Nextech Invest, a specialized oncology fund based in Zurich, Switzerland, led the investment round. They were joined by New York-based Arcus Ventures and the Tokyo-based venture firm BHP. Existing investor Brookline Investments of Birmingham, AL, also participated.

In a statement from the company, Tracon CEO Charles Theuer says the funding will enable the company to build on promising early stage research and complete multiple mid-stage trials of the antibody TRC105. Tracon says it is testing the antibody on a new tumor vascular target known as CD-105, as both a monotherapy and in combination with existing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitors as well as chemotherapy.

JAFCO’s Kenji Harada and Hironori Hozoji (a San Diego-based investment officer with JAFCO Life Science Investment) are joining Tracon’s board, along with Nextech managing partner Myoung-Ok Kwon. Tracon says two prominent oncologists, Harvard University’s William G. Kaelin and Charles L. Sawyers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center also were named to the company’s scientific advisory board.

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MabVax Therapeutics, a San Diego clinical stage biotechnology company developing vaccine and antibody-based therapies as a way to prevent recurrent cancer, says it has received a follow-on grant of $1.1 million under the Small Business Technology Transfer Program from the National Cancer Institute. Privately held MabVax is developing a human monoclonal antibody therapy to target the carbohydrate antigen sLeA, which is expressed by colon, pancreatic, and breast cancer cells. The antigen sLeA is believed to play an important role in cell adhesion and on the metastatic potential of these cancers.

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One of the things that fascinates me most about the slow-paced business of biotech is how utterly mismatched it is against the demands of Wall Street.

Asking for quarterly earnings reports from companies that are in the red, and likely to remain so for years, while they test drug candidates in early-stage clinical trials (which may or may not translate to success in a phase III study) is a little bit like requesting a Big Mac in a French restaurant. Investors want as-promised, fast-food results when biotech can only deliver a time-consuming coq au vin of variable success.

I was thinking about that earlier this week, when I saw a really interesting article about the tangible impact genomics and other “omics” are beginning to have in drug development. Those of you who have been around this business for a while remember the days of big promises by the likes of Human Genome Sciences, DeCode Genetics, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. That was a little over ten years ago, and genomics was being touted as the field that would revolutionize medicine. It would lead to new drug targets and a better understanding of human disease.

And now, given the dearth of drug candidates to materialize from that promise as of yet (and the hundreds of millions of investor dollars lost in the process, since many of the companies from the genomics boom went bust or nearly bust), naysayers love to point their finger at it as an example of another bubble burst.

There is some truth to these lamentations, but similar things were said of monoclonal antibodies, and now these therapies are making a real difference in patients’ lives. Life cycles in biotech and pharma may be too long to agree with many investors’ patience spans, but sometimes it pays to just wait.

Which brings me back to that paper I mentioned before: it just came out in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (June 2010 issue) and it gives some pretty interesting examples of how genomics and other “omics” (proteomics, metabolomics) are starting to impact drug development behind the scenes.

One of the goals of genomics is to find certain signatures that could be correlated with better response to treatment, or with a certain stages of disease (for example, an early form of cancer) to better select drug candidates or patient populations in clinical trials. But the problem is that this kind of information—usually a readout from massive gene-expression or other array-type experiments—is vast and hard to interpret.

For example, let’s say a company discovers after a failed phase II trial that higher expression of a set of 10 genes correlates, retrospectively, with response to therapy. A company might want to pursue the failed drug candidate within this specific subset of patients, but it would be too risky … Next Page »

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MabVax Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech developing novel vaccines and human antibodies for the treatment of cancer, plans to raise $4 million from investors, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which has raised about $500,000 so far, was founded in 2006 to develop polyvalent versions of existing monovalent vaccines against small cell lung cancer, sarcoma, melanoma, and other cancers. MabVax says it plans to develop fully human monoclonal antibody products at the same time.

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San Diego-based Sorrento Therapeutics has raised $2.3 million in a one-time equity investment, according to a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The biotech, which specializes in new methods for developing 100-percent human monoclonal antibodies, was founded in 2006 and lists Steve Zaniboni, Antonius Schuh, and Henry Ji as executives and directors.

Zaniboni was named in February as the chief financial officer at Xifin, which provides Software as a Service to support laboratory billings and financial management operations. He previously worked as CFO at San Diego’s AviaraDx, Arcturus Bioscience, and Sequenom, and held financial management positions at several life science companies in the Boston area.

The filing did not identify Sorrento’s investor. But Miami-based OpkoHealth said earlier this month it had made an investment in Sorrento Therapeutics in exchange for a one-third stake in the San Diego biotech. Opko says it also received an exclusive license to the Sorrento antibody library for the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies in the field of ophthalmology.

Ji is named on several recent patents relating to new ways for amplifying and cloning a specific region or sequences of immunological genes to generate antibody libraries.

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Cambridge, MA-based biotech company Dyax (NASDAQ:DYAX) announced today it had signed a pair of licensing agreements with French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis potentially worth $500 million. The deals, which involve a $25 million payment this year, grant the French company an exclusive worldwide license for the development and commercialization of Dyax’s fully human monoclonal antibody DX-2240, as well as a nonexclusive license to its antibody phage display technology. Dyax’s stock was up $0.72 (more than 20 percent) in late morning trading, to $4.28.

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