Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Hepregen closes $5M first funding round

By Mass High Tech staff

A New Jersey venture firm has committed the final $2 million of a $5 million Series A round raised by Medford-based Hepregen Corp.

Batelle Ventures LP and its partner, Tennessee-based Innovation Valley Partners, have committed the remaining $2 million of the round first reported by Mass High Tech in September, when the company secured the first $3 million from the same investors.
   
The company, which recently moved to Medford from Winchester, is developing a platform to reduce the liver toxicity caused by approved drugs. The platform is based on technology developed by 2009 Mass High Tech Woman to Watch Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The technology is based on engineered “miniature micro liver cells.”

Hepregen was co-founded in 2007 by Bhatia; Salman Khetani, director of research at Hepregen; and Bernadette Fendrock, president and CEO of the company. Bhatia has won at least two grants from the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT for her work on the liver-cell platform.