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Rib-X Pharmaceuticals Raises $50 Million
06/20/2006
New Haven, CT - Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately-held
biopharmaceutical company focused on designing and developing next-generation
antibiotics, today announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C
Preferred Stock financing. The round was led by existing investor Warburg
Pincus, the global private equity investment firm. This latest round of
financing brings the total amount raised by the company, since its inception in
2001, to $123 million.
In addition to Warburg Pincus, participants in the financing included
existing investors: ABS Ventures, Axiom Venture Partners, Cardinal Partners,
EuclidSR Partners, Oxford Bioscience Partners and S.R. One, Limited. Two new
investors joined the round: MedImmune Ventures, Inc. and Radius Ventures. In
conjunction with the financing Dr. Wayne T. Hockmeyer, President of MedImmune
Ventures and Chairman of MedImmune, Inc., will join the Rib-X Board of
Directors, bringing the total number of board members to nine.
"I am gratified by the interest in Rib-X from these distinguished new
investors and am particularly proud of the support shown by our existing
shareholders," said Dr. Susan Froshauer, President and Chief Executive Officer
of Rib-X. "These new funds will fuel the advancement of our two active
clinical-stage programs and further the build out of our pipeline of new
antibiotic clinical candidates derived from the company's proprietary
high-resolution x-ray crystallography and computational chemistry technologies."
"In the last three years, Rib-X has transitioned from a promising, technology
platform venture to a leading, clinical-stage antibiotics company," commented
Stewart Hen, a Warburg Pincus managing director. "The company now has important
products in development to treat the serious unmeet need of drug-resistant
bacteria in both the hospital and outpatient settings. We believe Rib-X is
positioned to redefine the antibiotics landscape in the future with novel drugs
from its proprietary engine: drugs that could not readily be developed using
traditional approaches to antibiotic drug discovery."
About Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Rib-X Pharmaceuticals is a product-driven small molecule drug discovery and
development company focused on the structure-based design of new classes of
antibiotics. The company's underlying drug discovery engine capitalizes on its
proprietary high-resolution crystal structure of the 50S subunit of the
ribosome, which performs an essential role in the fundamental process of protein
synthesis. Many known, commercially valuable antibiotics bind to the 50S,
including those used to treat both community-acquired and hospital-acquired
pathogens. The company's integrated research strategy, which combines state of
the art, proprietary computational analysis, x-ray crystallography, medicinal
chemistry, microbiology and biochemistry, allows it to rapidly synthesize new
agents designed to avoid typical antibiotic resistance mechanisms. Rib-X's
iterative intelligent engine has yielded several distinctive new antibiotic
classes. Its most advanced program, the R-01 program is in Phase I as an
oral/IV agent to treat serious hospital- Gram-positive infections. For more
information on the company, the ribosome and the Rib-X mission, please visit the
company website at www.rib-x.com.
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