2003/1/14 http://www.ipo.com/venture/press.asp?p=IPO&prid=2795
The Cosmos Alliance
Provides $6.5 Million in Bio Life Funding; Club Arranges Direct
Investments and Global Collaboration for Breakthrough Bio Life
Sciences Technologies
The Cosmos Alliance,
a new model for fostering global investments and business
collaborations among club members who are working to develop
breakthrough bio life technologies (www.cblsa.com), announced
today the successful completion of $6.5 million in investments in
December of 2002, which is the first in a series of ongoing
investments.
The initial
investments were made by four of the organization's corporate
members directly to technology members developing promising
biotechnology platforms. Alliance members receiving investments
were Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sensatex, Inc. of New York, New York; EluSys Therapeutics, Inc. of Pine Brook, New Jersey; and Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. of Seattle, Washington.
"There is a
huge bottleneck in developing bio life science products. Many
promising technologies do not advance due to funding
challenges," said Frank E. Young, M.D., Ph.D., former
commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and
chairman of the CBLSA. "At the Cosmos Alliance, we are
committed to identifying compelling early-stage companies and
introducing them to our corporate members for equity investments,
joint ventures, out-licensing, technology transfer and
collaborative research projects. There are benefits to both the
emerging companies and the corporate members. Instead of creating
high-risk ventures, we are facilitating the creation of stronger
businesses and expediting the development of important biomedical
products."
The Cosmos Alliance
was launched in August of 2002 by Dr. Young to enable more rapid
development of biomedical products, in turn aiding people with
life-threatening diseases.
The organization
will help get life-saving technologies to people by creating a
new mechanism for major international bio life science companies
to learn about, invest in and commercially collaborate with small
and emerging companies developing platform technologies.
"The Cosmos
Alliance offered not only funding, but also its global
intelligence network to develop opportunities for
collaboration," said Hossein A. Ghanbari, Ph.D., chairman,
president, and chief executive officer of Panacea
Pharmaceuticals, Inc., one of the first technology members funded
by the Alliance. "The Alliance has become our partner in
identifying opportunities, developing relationships, and securing
partners in Asia, Europe and the U.S."
The Cosmos Alliance
is an invitation-only membership organization that connects large
bio life science companies to carefully screened small
technology, research and development member companies seeking
Series B or C round equity investments and/or collaboration
opportunities.
The Cosmos Alliance
is managed by a Board of Directors lead by Dr. Young, chairman
and chief executive officer, and Robert G. Kalik, managing
director. Mr. Kalik is a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm
of KalikLewin.
He has more than 20
years of experience representing international and domestic
technology and biotechnology related companies and has previously
served as the managing director of a merchant bank and as
president of a national trade association.
The
Cosmos Alliance has partnered with Mitsubishi Corporation to serve as its business
integrator to develop corporate membership internationally. As
one of the Alliance's first corporate member investors,
Mitsubishi was instrumental in securing the founding Alliance
members in Japan and is currently working with the Alliance to
expand membership to Korea, China, Europe and the United States.
About The Cosmos Bio
Life Sciences Alliance
The Cosmos Bio Life
Sciences Alliance (CBLSA) is an international cross-industrial
"club" designed to develop, promote and foster
breakthrough technologies in bio life sciences.
Under the Alliance,
research-intensive early stage and emerging companies with
breakthrough platform technologies are encouraged to form
alliances with well-established companies seeking to move into
new fields as well as to harvest returns from equity investments.
Research and
development-stage company members join the Alliance to receive
research contracts from companies interested in their technology.
Finally, universities and other research organization members
join the Alliance to present their breakthrough research and
technology to Alliance members and to form valuable strategic
partnerships.
For more information
on the Alliance please visit www.cblsa.com.
About Mitsubishi
Corporation
Mitsubishi
Corporation is one of the world's most diverse enterprises.
Mitsubishi Corporation has decades of experience doing business
around the world, experience that has made it more than just a
leader in international trade.
The company's seven
business groups - New Business Initiatives, IT & Electronics,
Energy, Metals, Machinery, Chemicals and Living Essentials - work
closely with clients to develop new business opportunities.
Project
coordination, sourcing of raw materials, capital investment, and
development of sales channels are typical of the ways Mitsubishi
Corporation creates value for business partners, customers and
shareholders.
Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. http://www.panaceapharma.com/
Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is an emerging biopharmaceutical company focused on utilizing functional genomics and proteomics to develop therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for diseases with substantial unmet clinical need. The Company's product development focus is on novel proteins and biochemcial pathways related to cellular regulation and cell cycle abnormalities in oncology as well as neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
Through Collaborative Research Agreements with major institutions, Panacea has access to state-of-the-art facilities and partnerships with internationally recognized scientists in the development of its core technologies. Further, agreements with support groups offering expertise in key developmental areas have been forged.
Panacea has also assembled a large group of world-class scientists and physicians for its Scientific and Clinical Advisory Boards, each with selected specialties that will help ensure the expedited development and success of the Company's projects.
Sensatex, Inc http://www.sensatex.com/
Sensatex is focused on
the commercialization of our Sensatex SmarTextile Technology and
our SmartShirt System, a wearable solution for moving a wide
range of information on and off an active person.
Sensatex has developed groundbreaking
Interconnection Technology that allows sensing, monitoring, and
information processing devices to be networked together within a
fabric.
The Sensatex fabric
was first developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of
Technology's School of Textile and Fiber Engineering under the
auspices of the US military's 21st Century Land Warrior Program
and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
R&D arm of the US Department of Defense.
Our technology can
be incorporated into any fabric (cotton, lycra, wool, silk, etc.)
or blend of fabrics without effecting the look, feel or integrity
of the fabric that it is replacing.
The SmartShirt
System incorporates
advances in textile engineering, wearable computing, and wireless
data transfer to permit the convenient collection, transmission,
and analysis of personal health and lifestyle data.
Described as
"the shirt that thinks," the SmartShirt allows the
comfortable measuring and/or monitoring of individual biometric
data, such as heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature,
caloric burn, and provides readouts via a wristwatch, PDA, or
voice. Biometric information is wirelessly transmitted to a
personal computer and ultimately, the Internet.
EluSys Therapeutics, Inc. http://www.elusys.com/
EluSys Therapeutics,
Inc. ("EluSys" or the "Company") is focused
on the development and commercialization of the EluSys
Heteropolymer System
(the "Technology" or "HP System"), a novel
platform technology to treat a wide variety of blood-borne
infections and autoimmune diseases. The HP System should enable the rapid,
safe and efficient removal and destruction of viral particles,
bacteria, toxins and autoantibodies from the bloodstream by
injecting a therapeutic compound into the patient. The HP System
may be tailored to remove and destroy members of the major
classes of blood-borne pathogen within several hours of
administration, thus potentially providing an effective treatment
for a broad array of different diseases.
To date, results of
experiments conducted in live, non-human primates (monkeys)
indicate that the HP drugs dramatically improved the removal
(clearance) of various pathogenic substances (viruses, bacterial,
toxins, and autoantibodies) from the blood of these animals
relative to the rate of removal in the absence of the HP drug.
Moreover, several experiments have shown that the clearance rate
of a pathogen in the presence of an HP drug is much faster than
the clearance rate of that same pathogen in response to an equal
dose of the same monoclonal antibody in the form of a free
monoclonal antibody (that is, not crosslinked to the anti-CR1
MAb). In one experiment in which the concentration of a model
pathogen (a bacterial virus) was reduced approximately one
million fold in response to an HP drug in approximately one hour,
essentially no change was seen in the concentration of the virus
in the monkey’s blood when an identical dose of free
monoclonal antibody targeting the virus was administered.
Other experiments in
monkeys have also indicated that the ability of an HP drug to
promote rapid clearance of a pathogen can persist for at least
several days after its infusion into the blood circulation of an
animal. These results suggest that it may be possible to use HP
drugs prophylactically. That is, it may be possible to treat
individuals at risk of exposure to pathogens in advance with an
HP drug so that if they are exposed, the pathogen will be rapidly
cleared and unable to initiate an infection.
Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. http://www.acugen-neuro.com/
Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. is a new Seattle based biotechnology company which plans to utilize long-term neural cell culture technology to develop various in vitro neural disease models. The company will screen drugs for various neurodegenerative diseases including glaucoma, macular degeneration and Alzheimer's disease in collaboration with other pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies. Acugen Neuropeutics will also focus on developing image based analytical devices and plastic wares for high content cell based screening, which will become especially important in the postgenomics and postproteomics era.