Bayhill focused on the translation of research into therapeutics for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. The company pursued DNA-antigen vaccines and oligonucleotides that were specifically designed to promote immune intolerance. The company was dissolved in 2012.
Bayhill Therapeutics
Balance Therapeutics
Balance Therapeutics is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company developing therapies to improve the lives of patients with debilitating neurological conditions. The company focuses on areas of high unmet medical need where neurobiological pathways provide a strong rationale for our pharmacological approach. Balance's experienced drug development team is committed to advancing products to deliver life-improving medicines that serve patients and their families. The company's principal areas of focus are sleep disorders and cognitive deficits.
Athersys
Athersys is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that has established a pipeline of therapeutic product development programs in multiple disease indications. The company’s product portfolio consists of MultiStem, a non-embryonic stem cell-based approach for treating disease indications in the areas of inflammatory and immune, neurological and cardiovascular disease.
ArgoMed
ArgoMed developed a proprietary, water-induced thermotherapy device and technique to address the non-surgical treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). BPH is a condition that afflicts the majority of men over 60, causing adverse changes in urinary voiding patterns. ArgoMed's initial product received FDA market approval in 1999, before the company’s assets were acquired by Circon in 2002.
Arena Pharmaceuticals
In June 2012, Arena’s first commercial product, BELVIQ® (lorcaserin HCl), was approved by the FDA for chronic weight management, and is currently under review for regulatory approval in additional jurisdictions. Arena is also developing oral drug candidates for cardiovascular disease, inflammation and other disorders.
Anthera Pharmaceuticals
Anthera focuses on products to treat serious diseases associated with inflammation, including cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases. It went public in 2010. The company’s lead product candidate, blisibimod, targets elevated levels of B-cell activating factor (BAFF), which has been associated with a variety of B-cell mediated autoimmune diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Sjögren's Syndrome, Graves' Disease and others.
Anthera represents the third time that Pappas Ventures has backed a company associated with CEO Paul Truex. (The other two were Peninsula Pharmaceuticals and Cerexa, a spinout from Peninsula.)
Amplyx Pharmaceuticals
Amplyx Pharmaceuticals is developing novel, broad-spectrum antifungal agents for the treatment of life-threatening invasive fungal infections due to candida, aspergillus and rare molds. Patients undergoing chemotherapy and other immunosuppressive treatments end up with compromised immune systems. This makes them susceptible to a new disease—invasive fungal infections. Amplyx is advancing a novel small-molecule therapy, APX001, in clinical development. The Phase 1 program for APX001 is using both intravenous and oral formulations to address the need for treatment in both the hospital setting and continued convenient treatment after discharge.
Afferent Pharmaceuticals
Pappas Ventures co-founded Afferent in December 2009, after recognizing a novel mechanism with high potential in the treatment of chronic pain and other areas of substantial medical need.
Afferent is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing first-in-class treatments for chronic pain by targeting P2X3 receptors in peripheral nerves, where pain-causing stimuli are detected. This pathway offers the potential for pain treatments that will avoid CNS side effects and abuse liability, the principal factors that impair the use of currently available pain medications.
Afferent represents a transformative approach for treating chronic pain, an area of exceedingly high unmet medical need, without the safety and tolerability burden of therapeutics available today.
Aclara Biosciences
Aclara developed microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology with applications for genomics, high-throughput drug screening and clinical diagnostics. The company’s technology substantially enlarged throughput capacity while dramatically lowering costs compared with competing approaches. The cornerstone of Aclara’s product development strategy was a disposable plastic or glass “chip” called a LabCard that enabled the computerized control of the movement, measurement and mixing of liquids without the use of moving parts or valves.
