From Staff Reports
Copyright © 2015 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
i2E Inc. and Accele Venture Partners recently closed a $600,000 follow-on investment in Synereca Pharmaceuticals, a portfolio company of Accele Biopharma, an Oklahoma City-based biotechnology accelerator.
With the most recent investment, Synereca has now received $2.5 million in funding to support its development of compounds that address the growing problem of bacterial resistance to current antibiotics.
Synereca’s lead program is designed to restore or increase the effectiveness of existing antibiotics that have been compromised by drug-resistant bacteria. Preclinical results have shown that combining Synereca’s compounds with current antibiotics restores and enhances their activity against highly resistant pathogens that cause difficult-to-treat bacterial infections.
Synereca is based in Oklahoma City, and has laboratories in Oklahoma City and North Carolina.
The latest investment round was led by Accele Venture Partners, the investing arm of life sciences accelerator Accele Biopharma, the Oklahoma Seed Capital Fund, managed by i2E Inc., and other existing investors.
“Synereca’s approach — potentiating the activity of existing classes of antibiotics — has demonstrated compelling preclinical results,” said Clayton Duncan, the company’s CEO. “Gram-Negative hospital-acquired infections are an important clinical need for hundreds of thousands of patients, and this capital enables Synereca to select its first Investigational New Drug candidate.”
The Oklahoma Seed Capital Fund is a state-appropriated fund managed by i2E through a contract with the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology.
Located in the University Research Park in Oklahoma City, Accele Biopharma was created as a business accelerator to enable bioscience startups to develop groundbreaking science from the laboratory to the proof of concept stage and beyond.
Accele Venture Partners LP is a limited partnership formed to invest, together with established institutional life science investors, in the initial funding of life science companies selected and managed by Accele Biopharma Inc.
