April 26, 2010 - Mission Bay Capital, LLC, has made its first investment, acquiring a stake in Redwood Bioscience, an entrepreneurial company based on technology licensed from the University of California, Berkeley.
Redwood Bioscience is a five-employee company based in Burlingame, CA, that uses precision protein-chemical engineering to improve the strength and effective life of biotherapeutics.
“This company showed the type of promise we were looking for in the quality of its fundamental research, its leadership and its potential for benefiting society,” said Regis Kelly, PhD, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and a pro bono director of Mission Bay Capital.
This is the first of 15 companies the fund intends to invest in over the next four years to take them to the proof-of-concept stages, Kelly said.
Redwood’s core technology, “aldehyde tagging,” is based on research conducted in the laboratory of UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry and Howard Hughes Investigator Carolyn Bertozzi, PhD. Redwood was founded by Bertozzi; David Rabuka, PhD, a former graduate student of Bertozzi’s who is Redwood’s chief scientific officer; and Mike Blank, an entrepreneur and former management consultant who is Redwood’s vice president of operations. The team also includes Karen Boezi, formerly a founder of life science and medical technology-focused venture firm Thomas, McNerney & Partners, as Redwood’s chief executive officer.
“We are extremely pleased to have Mission Bay Capital as an investor,” Boezi said. “Not only does their investment bring important financial resources to the company, MBC provides research and clinical networking resources throughout the broader UC community that have already proven valuable to Redwood.”
Aldehyde tagging can be used to join small molecules, such as drugs, to larger proteins. It provides an alternative to the common practice of genetically fusing a tiny therapeutic peptide to a large carrier protein, which is done to slow the rate at which peptides degrade in the bloodstream. Peptides that are attached to carriers by aldehyde tagging could prove more potent than those genetically fused to carriers, Boezi said, because the peptides more closely mimic their native shape.
Redwood’s technology is also useful in engineering antibodies to carry drugs to specific targets in the body, according to Boezi. Aldehyde tagging provides more control over the number and placement of drug payloads on the targeting antibodies than is possible with existing techniques, she said, and should produce a more uniform therapeutic that is more effective and less toxic.
Mission Bay Capital is an independent, seed-stage venture firm focused on making pivotal, early-stage investments in bioscience companies emerging from the University of California. Launched in August 2009, the San Francisco-based firm has a three-fold goal: to launch more successful companies from the University of California; attract the attention of other venture capital firms to participate in this process; and build an innovative model for building a sustainable source of funding for QB3. The fund considers companies based on both their likelihood of commercial success and potential benefit to society.
Both Kelly and QB3 associate director Douglas Crawford, PhD, serve as unpaid directors of Mission Bay Capital, LLC. The firm operates outside the UC system and receives no state or public funding.
QB3 is a cooperative effort among private industry and more than 200 scientists at UCSF, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. One of four technology institutes created in 2000 by former California Governor Gray Davis, QB3 harnesses the quantitative sciences of information technology, imaging and engineering to integrate and enhance scientific understanding of biological systems at all levels, enabling scientists to tackle problems that have been previously unapproachable.
UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. For more information, visit www.ucsf.edu.