Japan-based Santen Pharmaceuticals’s US subsidiary has invested in Clearside Biomedical, a spin-out launched from research at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Clearside, a drug and technology developer for treatment of eye diseases, raised $7.9m from Santen, venture capital firms Mountain Group Capital and Hatteras Venture Partners, Georgia Research Alliance Fund and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler Business School Private Equity Fund.
Hatteras Venture Partners, Georgia Research Alliance and Kenan Flagler Venture Fund invested $4m to launch Clearside in January 2012.
The company was formed with the assistance of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab program, the US-based university’s centre for commercialisation.
Clearside’s microneedle technology was developed in a collaboration between the research groups of Henry Edelhauser, professor of ophthalmology at Emory University School of Medicine, and Mark Prausnitz, a Regents’ professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The National Institutes of Health sponsored research leading to development of the technology.
Daniel White, executive president of Clearside, said: “The collaboration with Santen prepares an avenue to develop state-of-the-art medications for the critical treatment of sight-threatening diseases.”
In November 2012, Clearside announced its first successful human dosing with the device in a safety and tolerability study in patients with retinal disease.
