BiPar appends $35M 2nd Round

Cancer drug developer BiPar Sciences Inc. raised $35 million in a second round of venture capital led by Domain Associates LLC of Princeton, N.J., to move into Phase 2 clinical trials of a lead drug candidate. The funds will also be used to advance several other candidates in a preclinical pipeline.

The deal brings total equity funding in the five-year-old Brisbane, Calif.-based company to $48 million and includes investment from previous backers Vulcan Capital of Seattle, Canaan Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., PolyTechnos Venture-Partners of Germany, Asset Management Co. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Quantum Technology Partners of San Jose, Calif.

BiPar founder and CEO Tom White said the new funding will allow the company to move forward with several compounds it has developed for cancer treatment based on inhibiting PARP 1 enzymes.

White said the company has already conducted several Phase 1 trials in humans and that the new round will get the company to proof-of-concept stage as early as 2008 when it will consider other funding options including partnerships. Wende Hutton, a venture partner with Canaan Partners, said the company already had some data on hand from earlier developers of its compounds at the time of the Series A round, and she said the company was able to significantly advance its PARP program in Phase 1 trials.

PARPs, or Poly ADP-ribosepolymerases, are enzymes that repair DNA in cells, and PARP inhibitors are compounds that prevent such repair in cancer cells to allow the cells to die off. White said PARPs have been identified for more than a decade in numerous diseases outside of cancer, but that founders recognized a pathway for the development of cancer drugs using the technology, and in 2002 the Tiburon, Calif.-based company that had been working with HIV. Hutton said the company had a head start when it licensed the compounds and that it had met milestones laid out in the original funding.

“We stepped up considerably in the Series B round, which had been our intent from the start,” Hutton said. “We very much liked the PARP program, and they already had significant safety data, but a lot of the understanding of how powerful the compounds could be in tumors was speculative.”

White said in addition to the original $13 million from the Series A round in November 2004 that the company arranged for $5 million in venture debt from Lighthouse Ventures of Palo Alto in March 2005, and he said the current round came ahead of schedule, at an attractive valuation.

“We had not planned to go out until January, but we ended up three months ahead of schedule based on data and were able to close the round early after talking to a small group of investors,” he said. White would not disclose a precise valuation for the current funding, but he said it was up “meaningfully” from the Series A post-money valuation of $18 million.

Jesse Treu, a general partner with Domain, said BiPar had gained considerable ground in product development and in building a management team with its early funding.

“Domain was attracted to BiPar because of the potential of the PARP receptors in a good number of cancers, and there are numerous cancers in which PARP appears to be up-regulated and so might be good candidates for the company’s lead compound,” Treu said. “Domain was also impressed with the experience of the management team, including people whom we have known well from past activities.” BiPar did not use an outside financial adviser in putting the round together. It called on the legal services of Mike O’Donnell of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto. Michael Sanders of Reed Smith LLP in Los Angeles represented investors.