Monday, June 12, 2006

Kleiner Perkins to open Mass. office

By Dyke Hendrickson

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a major venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., will open an office in Boston later this month with one of the nation's top vaccine experts at the helm.

Dr. Thomas Monath, chief scientific officer of Cambridge-based Acambis plc, plans to join the company as a partner on June 26. He will be a key player as Kleiner Perkins considers investments from the $200 million "pandemic preparedness and biodefense fund" it formed in February.

The presence of Kleiner Perkins on the East Coast could mean more funding for local life-sciences companies focused on vaccines and antivirals. Monath, 65, said he will be retiring from Acambis though he plans to remain on its board.

"I might have stayed longer at Acambis, but this was an exciting opportunity from a venture group that set up a fund specifically for certain diseases," said Monath.

Monath will work with young companies to develop vaccines, antiviral drug, and rapid diagnostics, said Kleiner partner Brook Byers in an e-mail.

Byers called Monath "a superstar in the vaccine and infectious disease world," and said his presence would help the venture firm's team identify promising young companies. Kleiner Perkins is believed to be the only venture firm to have a fund dedicated to developing medications to counter pandemics.

"There are innovation gaps in vaccines, antivirals and rapid diagnostics," said Byers. Kleiner Perkins' $200 million fund is designed to close that gap.

Kleiner Perkins often invests on the West Coast but Boston-area investments have included Lotus Development Corp. (acquired by IBM Corp.), Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. and PictureTel (the Andover videoconferencing company acquired by Polycom Inc. in 2001).

More recently it has invested in Codon Devices Inc., a Cambridge startup focusing on synthetic biology, and Lilliputian Systems Inc., a fuel-cell development company in Woburn.

This week, Kleiner Perkins led a funding round that provided $9.8 million for Cambridge-based security software maker Bit9 Inc., with participation from existing investors Atlas Venture in Waltham and Highland Capital Partners in Lexington.

Monath said he will be opening an office in the Cambridge area near his home. He said he will be pursuing opportunities worldwide, but "I will focus a lot of my work in the eastern half of the United States."

"Tom is a world-renowned scientific expert in vaccines for infectious disease," said Michael Lytton, a partner at Oxford Bioscience Partners, a venture capital firm in Boston. "KP's new fund will provide excellent funding and management assistance to Massachusetts companies working in the pandemic and bioterrorism fields. KP's fund is a great addition to the funding environment ... but I don't think it will change the VC landscape here, because that fund is so specialized."

Monath has been chief scientific officer at Acambis and its predecessor company since 1992. Acambis has headquarters in Cambridge, England, but most of its 270 employees are in Cambridge, Mass., and Canton.

Monath headed a mammoth smallpox-production project in 2003, at which time Acambis produced and shipped 182 million doses of vaccine for the federal government. The company manufactured another 50 million doses that have been stockpiled.

"I am very proud of that," Monath said about the project, valued at $500 million. "In terms of size, it was probably as large as any vaccine undertaking since the polio efforts years ago."

Prior to joining OraVax Inc., the company that became Acambis, Monath was chief of the virology division of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He also spent almost two decades with the Centers for Disease Control, in the division that monitored vector-borne infections, and was once president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.