EU Pledges Billions to Drug Development

When the Danish biopharmaceutical company Action Pharma incorporated in May 2000, it had four academic founders and AP214—an anti-inflammatory drug candidate designed to prevent organ failure after heart surgery. However, despite the promise of AP214 and the scientific credentials of its creators, Action Pharma had a tough time attracting investors.To stay afloat with only a small sum of cash, Torbjörn Bjerke and his fellow founding partners “built the company almost on a virtual base,” he recalls. By this Bjerke means that the start-up depended largely on contract research organizations to further develop AP214 and its other candidate compounds. In a massive round of venture capital funding last month, Action Pharma raised €15 million ($22 million), enough to help it conduct more in-house testing. Still, seven years is a long time to wait for big-ticket investors. “We would have had better opportunities to attract more money, and faster, if we were located in the US,” Bjerke says.Read more at...Nature Medicine, February 2008.