Advent Venture Partners

Avila presents data on its novel, orally-available protease inhibitor, AVL-181, demonstrating viral clearance of hepatitis C virus in preclinical models

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BOSTON & WALTHAM, Mass. - Avila Therapeutics™, Inc., a biotechnology company developing novel covalent drugs that treat diseases through protein silencing, presented results of preclinical studies on its highly selective, small molecule Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) protease inhibitor, AVL-181. Avila showed that AVL-181 promoted complete viral clearance in vitro when used at clinically-relevant concentrations in combination with other HCV therapies. Additionally, using an innovative technology for measuring the extent of covalent bond formation, Avila showed that AVL-181 bonds selectively and irreversibly to HCV protease in vivo in a novel rodent model, thus silencing a key protein necessary for successful viral replication and resulting in a prolonged duration of action in vivo. These new data were presented today at the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) international meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

"Our clinical candidate, AVL-181, demonstrated inhibition across multiple genotypes and drug-resistant mutations of the HCV protease. In addition, the data showing complete viral clearance in conjunction with other cutting edge therapies are striking,” said Katrine Bosley, Chief Executive Officer, Avila. "These data provide additional support for the clinical evaluation of AVL-181, and we are on track to advance into clinical development next year.”

In one presentation, “Potential for Rapid and Prolonged Therapeutic Benefit in HCV through Protein Silencing of NS3 Protease with AVL-181”, the data show that the orally-available, novel HCV protease inhibitor, AVL-181:

selectively bonds the HCV NS3 protease to completely and irreversibly inactivate proteolytic activity, essentially silencing the HCV protease complex;
forms a highly specific covalent bond across HCV genotypes and clinically-described drug-resistant mutant proteases;
inhibits protease activity in cultured replicon cells for >48 hours after very brief exposure and removal of AVL-181;
demonstrates prolonged pharmacodynamic activity for both wild-type and drug-resistant mutations (e.g. R155K); and;
results in clearance of HCV RNA from replicon cells in conjunction with a non-nucleoside polymerase inhibitor, contributing to a profile that differentiates AVL-181 from clinically investigated agents.

In a second presentation, “AVL-181 Demonstrates Prolonged Inhibition of HCV NS3 Protease Activity In Vivo that Directly Correlates with Prolonged Molecular Target Occupancy”, the data demonstrate that the orally available, novel HCV protease inhibitor, AVL-181:

potently and irreversibly silences HCV proteases, and that the level of protease inhibition is directly correlated with the extent of target bonding;
durably inhibits the HCV protease for at least 10 hours in vivo after a single exposure as measured in a novel model in which NS3/4A is expressed in the mouse liver; and
this duration of action coupled with the low plasma levels of AVL-181 at this late timepoint confirm that the covalent mechanism does not depend on the near-continuous drug exposure such as that required by the reversible HCV protease inhibitors currently in late-stage clinical trials.

About the Avilomics™ Platform and Covalent Drugs

The Avilomics platform is Avila's powerful approach to design and develop covalent drugs that strongly, selectively, and resiliently bond to disease?causing proteins, thereby silencing their activity and producing superior pharmacological outcomes. Covalent drugs inherently provide prolonged duration of action through this silencing of the disease target, and they can solve the critical therapeutic challenges of drugging difficult targets and addressing resistance mutations. The three components of Avilomics are:

Compositions: Innovative chemical structures for forming highly selective, not indiscriminate, covalent bonds
Design: Proprietary informatics to uniquely identify sites amenable to selective covalent modification and target silencing
Testing: Empirical methods to demonstrate covalent specificity at both target and proteomic levels

Together, these components provide a platform for efficient design and testing of covalent drugs. Avilomics opens up the broad potential of covalent drugs across target classes and disease areas, as demonstrated with the company's emerging pipeline of novel, protein silencing covalent drugs.

About Avila Therapeutics™, Inc.

Avila focuses on design and development of covalent drugs to achieve best-in-class outcomes that cannot be achieved through traditional chemistries. This approach is called “protein silencing”. The company is developing a pipeline of novel, protein-silencing covalent drugs with a current focus on viral infection, cancer and autoimmune disease. Avila is funded by leading venture capital firms: Abingworth, Advent Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Novartis Option Fund, and Polaris Venture Partners.

Contact: Yates Public Relations
Adriana Jenkins, 617-710-8350

Sony Pictures Imageworks and The Foundry Share Technologies

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Culver City, CA, November 2, 2009.  Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and animation company known for the innovative digital production tools it provides to its artists and filmmakers, and The Foundry, a leading developer of visual effects (VFX) software, are embarking on a reciprocal technology sharing relationship to mutually advance the state of the art in visual effects and digital production.

In this unique collaboration, The Foundry acquires access to Sony Pictures Imageworks' highly regarded 2D/3D lighting technology package, Katana, with which they will be able to collaborate on future developments.  As part of the collaboration, Sony Pictures Imageworks adds The Foundry's industry renowned compositing software, Nuke, to its existing stable of the company's plug-ins.  Katana is a production-proven toolset that has been used by Imageworks to facilitate their award-winning VFX work on films such as the Spider-ManTM movies, Superman Returns, I am Legend and, most recently, G-Force, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and the upcoming Alice in Wonderland.  Nuke has most recently been used on such films as District 9, Transformers, and Terminator Salvation.

The agreement also involves close cooperation going forward.  The two companies will work together to ensure the successful use and integration of each other's technology, and exchange updates and new discoveries.

"Artistry enabled by cutting-edge technology is the cornerstone of our business," said Randy Lake, executive vice president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks. "This creative relationship with The Foundry brings great technologies together and places powerful production tools into the hands of artists."

"Imageworks is taking a far more open approach to its technology. Sharing software with a progressive company like The Foundry is an important step for both of our companies," said Rob Bredow, chief technology officer of Sony Pictures Imageworks.  "First, it enables Imageworks to provide the best compositing tools to our artists today by adopting Nuke widely into our VFX and animation workflows.  And second, The Foundry has a proven track record of taking production proven software and turning it into industry-leading solutions.  We're looking forward to collaborating with The Foundry to help create the next generation of tools leveraging the best of our mutual technologies. We are expecting great things from this relationship to give artists the tools to create even greater imagery."

Bill Collis, The Foundry CEO, said, "It's highly unusual for software or post production companies to share technologies and that's what makes our new relationship with Sony Pictures Imageworks so special. There are some exciting ideas we can explore over the coming years, building on Imageworks' Katana technology and The Foundry's customer-driven product focus for Nuke to deliver the next generation of compositing software.  Sony is obviously a highly respected player in the industry and the fact that they are implementing our software, and collaborating on future products, is a huge compliment. We are looking forward to working with Sony, and to seeing what fantastic results we can achieve together."

Imageworks continues to aggressively advance the company's artist capabilities and core technology, optimize its production pipeline and processes, and foster broad-based adoption of formerly proprietary tools.

In June, Imageworks named Rob Bredow, one of the industry's leading visual effects supervisors, as its Chief Technology Officer.  Bredow, who was most recently the visual effects supervisor on the hit animated movie Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, brings practical experience and artistic perspective to this new role. He has been instrumental in optimizing the production pipeline and improving the company's color, lighting and rendering processes.

The Katana software is an integral component of this strategic partnership with The Foundry.  Katana is a tool developed at Imageworks to aid artists in look development, lighting, rendering and compositing of digital imagery. Rather than defining a rigid pipeline for these tasks, Katana provides a framework for building custom tools tailored to the unique needs of each show. In development since 2004, this approach has allowed Imageworks to remain "cutting edge" when "cutting edge" is a constantly moving target.  Through the Foundry relationship, this technology can now become available to the industry.

In August, Imageworks launched five of its technologies into an open-source development program. The program initially includes OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database migration tool, and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

- Ends -

ABOUT THE FOUNDRY
The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post-production.

The Foundry has a well-established client base that includes leading visual effects facilities worldwide, such as Warner Bros., The Moving Picture Company, Weta Digital, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Digital Domain. It is at the cutting edge of software development, marketing and sales for visual effects compositing.

In June 2009, The Foundry announced a management buyout for an undisclosed sum led by Advent Venture Partners.  Advent backed The Foundry's management team, led by CEO Dr. Bill Collis and the original founders.

The Foundry is highly profitable and has more than doubled revenues in the last eighteen months to $10m. Advent's support permits the company to continue expansion plans that have seen staff numbers more than double from 20 to over 50 in the past two years.

The Foundry's products support a wide range of award-winning host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Nuke, Scratch, Shake and Final Cut Pro.  In 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award® to The Foundry's development team for the Furnace image processing suite.  The company now holds two products with AMPAS Sci-Tech Award® winning technology including high-end compositing system Nuke.

The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For more information please visit : www.thefoundry.co.uk

For Further Information contact:
Cordelia Meacher, cordelia@if-communications.com +44 (0) 7961 311080

ABOUT SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS
Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is the Academy Award® winning, state-of-the-art visual effects and animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions. The Imageworks production environment supports live-action visual effects and character animation, all-CG animation, Imageworks 3D stereoscopic, and Imageworks Interactive, a full service creative group that produces websites and supports digital marketing for the studio and outside clients.

Imageworks' achievements have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Oscars® for its work on SPIDER-MAN™ 2 and the CG animated short film THE CHUBBCHUBBS! In 2008, SURF'S UP was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2007, two of Imageworks' projects, SUPERMAN RETURNS and the all-CG animated feature MONSTER HOUSE, were nominated for Academy Awards in the Outstanding Achievement in Visual Effects and Best Animated Feature respectively. With those two nominations, Imageworks became the first studio to be recognized in the same year in these distinct areas, an indication of the diversity and quality of the company's capabilities. Other Oscar® nominated projects include THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, SPIDER-MAN™, HOLLOW MAN, STUART LITTLE and STARSHIP TROOPERS, for a total of ten nominations.

Imageworks' most recently completed projects include CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, G-FORCE, and WATCHMEN, Upcoming projects include 2012, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and CATS AND DOGS 2.

Imageworks maintains operations in Culver City, CA; Novato, CA; Albuquerque, New Mexico and Chennai, India.

Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is a division of Sony Pictures Digital Production Inc.

For more information, please visit www.imageworks.com.

For further information, please contact: donlevy@sonypictures.com

Zong adds debit and credit cards support to mobile payments service

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Using a Cellphone Number to Pay for Virtual Goods

by Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times

Eventually, online shoppers might simply need to enter their cellphone number to pay for a purchase. Two online payment start-ups, Zong and Obopay, have taken a step closer to making that a reality.

Both companies, players in the hot online payments market, announced this week that customers could now link their credit or debit card numbers to their cellphone numbers on Zong and Obopay’s Web sites. Then, when they are shopping for digital goods on certain Web sites, they need only enter their 10-digit phone number to buy something instead of being re-directed to a separate Web page and entering extensive credit card information.

“It’s really a matter of trying to simplify the user experience and keep the user from having to re-enter confidential information, spread across the Web,” said Michael Ting, senior director of online payments at Obopay. People are 10 times as likely to complete a purchase when they can enter a cellphone number instead of getting their wallet and entering credit card information, said David Marcus, chief executive of Zong.

Many online gaming sites and social networks use Zong as a payment option, including Slide, RockYou and Facebook’s newly expanded virtual gift shop. Obopay is also aiming at online gaming sites, but Mr. Ting would not say which, if any, sites had agreed to use Obopay.

For security, Obopay requires customers to enter a password in addition to the cellphone number. Zong sends the customer a text message and the customer either replies to verify the payment or enters a one-time password.

Letting people use their cellphone numbers to pay for virtual goods online is a new direction for Obopay. So far, it has been focusing on letting people send money to one another via text message, which we have covered. People use it to send their children money or to pay tutors or housekeepers, for example.

Zong has already been letting people use their cellphone numbers to pay for things online, but until now, the charges appeared on users’ cellphone bills. This is inefficient, Mr. Marcus said, because carriers typically charge a fee of 40 percent of the purchase price and limit the total amount that can be added to a cellphone bill.

Eventually, both companies want to let online shoppers pay for real stuff, like books or clothes, using their cellphone numbers. They are starting with virtual goods in online games and social networks because more people are comfortable using their cellphone numbers to pay for these types of things.

Eventually, they hope to have enough customers to convince merchants that people want to use their cellphone numbers to pay for real goods. Then, the idea goes, Zong or Obopay could be a payment option on e-commerce sites, just like using a credit card or PayPal is today.

Micromet and Sanofi-aventis Sign Global Collaboration and License Agreement for New Solid Tumor BiTE Antibody

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

BETHESDA, Md., Oct 29, 2009 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Micromet, Inc. (Nasdaq:MITI), a biopharmaceutical company developing novel, proprietary antibodies for the treatment of cancer, inflammation and autoimmune diseases, and sanofi-aventis (NYSE Euronext:SAN) (NYSE:SNY) announced today a global collaboration and license agreement to develop a BiTE(R) antibody against an antigen present at the surface of carcinoma cells. BiTE antibodies are novel therapeutic antibodies that activate a patient's T cells to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

Under this agreement, Micromet will be mainly responsible for the discovery, research and development of the BiTE antibody through the completion of phase 1 clinical trials under the supervision of a Joint Steering Committee. Sanofi-aventis will then have the full responsibility for the further development, as well as for the worldwide commercialization of the BiTE antibody.

"Micromet's BiTE antibodies represent a promising new approach to treating cancer," declared Marc Cluzel, Executive Vice-President R&D, sanofi-aventis. "We believe BiTE antibodies have the potential to significantly expand the treatment options that we can offer to cancer patients in the future."

"We are very pleased to start a new BiTE antibody program with sanofi-aventis," said Christian Itin, Micromet's Chief Executive Officer. "As we continue to make progress in the clinical development of our BiTE antibodies for hematological cancers and solid tumors, this collaboration with sanofi-aventis further validates the BiTE antibody technology and creates the opportunity to expand the pipeline of BiTE antibodies for the treatment of solid tumors."

Under the terms of the agreement, sanofi-aventis agreed to pay Micromet an upfront cash payment of 8 million euros (approx. US$ 12 million) following signing of the agreement. Micromet is eligible for development and regulatory milestone payments of up to 162 million euros (approx. US$ 241 million), plus performance-based sales milestones of up to 150 million euros (approx. US$ 224 million) and royalties on worldwide product sales.

About BiTE Antibodies
BiTE(R) antibodies are designed to direct the body's cytotoxic, or cell-destroying, T cells against tumor cells, and represent a new therapeutic approach to cancer therapy. Typically, antibodies cannot engage T cells because T cells lack the appropriate receptors for binding antibodies. BiTE antibodies have been shown to bind T cells to tumor cells, ultimately inducing a self-destruction process in the tumor cells referred to as apoptosis, or programmed cell death. In the presence of BiTE antibodies, T cells have been demonstrated to serially eliminate tumor cells, which explains the activity of BiTE antibodies at very low concentrations. Through the killing process, T cells start to proliferate, which leads to an increased number of T cells at the site of attack.

About Micromet, Inc.
Micromet, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company developing novel, proprietary antibodies for the treatment of cancer, inflammation and autoimmune diseases. Its product development pipeline includes novel antibodies generated with its proprietary BiTE(R) antibody platform, as well as conventional monoclonal antibodies. Two of Micromet's BiTE antibodies and three of its conventional antibodies are currently in clinical trials. Micromet's preclinical product pipeline includes several novel BiTE antibodies generated with its proprietary BiTE antibody platform technology. Micromet's collaboration partners include sanofi-aventis, Bayer Schering Pharma, Merck Serono, MedImmune and Nycomed.

About Sanofi-aventis
Sanofi-aventis, a leading global pharmaceutical company, discovers, develops and distributes therapeutic solutions to improve the lives of everyone. Sanofi-aventis is listed in Paris (NYSE Euronext:SAN) and in New York (NYSE:SNY).

Forward-Looking Statements
This release contains certain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include statements regarding the operation of the global collaboration with sanofi-aventis, the efficacy, safety and intended utilization of our product candidates, including the BiTE antibody that is the subject of the agreement with sanofi-aventis, the mode of action of BiTE antibodies, the conduct, timing and results of future clinical trials, expectations of the future expansion of our product pipeline and collaborations, and the future payment of milestone and royalty payments by sanofi-aventis. You are urged to consider statements that include the words "ongoing," "may," "will," "believes," "potential," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "intends," or the negative of those words or other similar words to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by any forward-looking statements include the risk that product candidates that appeared promising in early research, preclinical studies or clinical trials do not demonstrate safety and/or efficacy in subsequent clinical trials, the risk that encouraging results from early research, preclinical studies or clinical trials may not be confirmed upon further analysis of the detailed results of such research, preclinical study or clinical trial, the risk that additional information relating to the safety, efficacy or tolerability of our product candidates may be discovered upon further analysis of preclinical or clinical trial data, the risk that we or our collaborators will not obtain approval to market our product candidates, the risks associated with reliance on outside financing to meet capital requirements, and the risks associated with reliance on collaborators, including sanofi-aventis, MedImmune, Merck Serono, TRACON and Nycomed, for the funding or conduct of further development and commercialization activities relating to our product candidates. These factors and others are more fully discussed in Micromet's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2009, filed with the SEC on August 6, 2009, as well as other filings by the company with the SEC.

CONTACT:  Micromet, Inc.
US Media:
Andrea tenBroek
Chris Stamm
(781)-684-0770
micromet@schwartz-pr.com

European Media:
Ludger Wess
+49 (40) 8816 5964
ludger@akampion.com
US Investors:
Susan Noonan
(212) 966-3650
susan@sanoonan.com

European Investors:
Ines-Regina Buth
+49 (30) 2363 2768
ines@akampion.com