Biotech SF: Corthera

Adynxx founder Julien Mamet.

Adynxx Inc., led by a team that has built and sold three other Bay Area drug developers over the past decade, said Tuesday that it has completed enrollment in an early-stage drug trial that could take the pain out of surgery. The 30-person, Phase I study is the first in-human test of AYX-1, the San Francisco company’s experimental preventative treatment for post-surgical pain. The study of healthy volunteers is designed to test the drug’s safety. Adynxx leaders expect to move the drug into a 90- to 100-patient Phase II efficacy trial in the fourth quarter.

Some of my favorite stories.

• "The fight of his life" (2007)

Last year Mike Homer helped raise the money for 2,000 medical research computers. Now researchers are using that equipment in an attempt to save his life.

• "For reporter, CJD is more than a story" (2007)

Seven years ago -- nearly to the day -- my mother died of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease.

• "A son's YouTube plea for Avastin" (2010)

Josh Turnage is your typical teenager, trying to discover what he wants to do in college and with his life. But a 7-minute, 41-second YouTube video he produced about his mother's fight with breast cancer may thrust him into a debate between drug makers and the agency that regulates them.

• "New device could knock out old dialysis technology" (2011)

Shuvo Roy has all the makings for the world's first implantable artificial kidney, thanks to nanotechnology and a web of nationwide collaborations.

All he needs now is $20 million.

Biotech SF

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Pain drug developer Adynxx enrolls first trial