A federal bankruptcy court approved a $40 million takeover of cancer drug developer Bind Therapeutics Inc. by pharmaceuticals titan Pfizer Inc. Pfizer submitted a $19.7 million stalking horse bid that Bind disclosed July 1.BIND, which focuses on targeted and programmable compounds called Accurins, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May. Accurins are engineered to target specific cells and tissues and deliver drugs to the disease sites.
In February, BIND and AstraZeneca published data in the journal Science Translational Medicine describing their development of the first nanoparticle preclinical candidate. An introduction to the article writes, "A class of drugs, called kinase inhibitors, could stop cancer in its tracks ... if only these drugs could reach the tumors, stay for a while, and not be toxic. Hypothesizing that a nanoparticle formulation would solve the inhibitors' woes, Ashton and Colleagues investigated several different compositions of so-called Accurins-polymeric particles that encapsulate charged drugs through ion pairing."
BIND Therapeutics stock is responding positively to the news of the asset buy, rising from $0.52 on July 21 to its current price of $1.17.
BIND was founded in 2006 by MIT researcher Robert Langer and went public on September 20, 2013. BIND's technology was based on work by Langer and Harvard Medical School scientist Omid Farkohzad.
It raised $76.1 million in the 2013 IPO and another $20 million in 2015. Earlier the company had raised $62.6 million in four rounds of equity funding with six investors: ARCH Venture Partners, Endeavour Vision, Flagship Ventures, NanoDimension, Polaris Partners, and RUSNANO.
However, at the end of 2015 the company had $40 million in cash and short-term investments, and slashed almost 40 percent of its staff, including a research operation in Russia with 11 employees. The bankruptcy was initiated because of an April 26 notice by Hercules Capital, a Palo Alto, California-based venture debt firm that demanded full payment of the $13.2 million balance on its load, including $1.2 million in fees.