Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Acetylon finds $12.4 million Series B funding

By Michelle Lang

Boston startup Acetylon Pharmaceuticals Inc. has raised $12.4 million of a planned $30 million Series B financing round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company, founded in 2008, is focused on commercializing Histone Deacetylase inhibitors  and pharmaceutical technology coming out of Harvard University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The regulatory filing does not specifically list the investors in the financing.

In January 2010, Acetylon pulled in a $2 million funding, rounding out the company’s total investment at that time to $9.25 million, after the company took in $7.25 million in its August 2009 Series A round. Those investors also were not named.

Last March, the company began licensing a drug discovery platform and group of enzyme inhibitors from Harvard and Dana-Farber.

HDAC is a target for drugs that could be used to treat inflammatory disease, neurologic disease and in cancer, according to Acetylon. The company is developing drug candidates based on Class 2 selective HDAC inhibitors.

Acetylon’s HDAC inhibitors were developed at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and at Harvard University by scientific co-founders Ken Anderson, Kraft Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Jay Bradner, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Ralph Mazitschek, instructor at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Stuart Schreiber, Morris Loeb professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.