National Editor

You might say Alex Zaffaroni stuck a feather in his cap and called it $45 million.

The latest "feather" for the biotechnology veteran comes in the form of the first round of institutional funding to support Palo Alto, Calif.-based Alexza MDC, founded by Zaffaroni. He also was founder and CEO of Mountain View, Calif.-based ALZA Corp., acquired by New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson in a $10.5 billion stock swap.

That's not all. Zaffaroni launched Affymax Inc., also of Palo Alto; Affymetrix Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif.; Maxygen Inc., of Redwood City, Calif.; SurroMed Inc., also of Mountain View; and Symyx Technologies Inc., also of Santa Clara.

The "MDC" in the new company that, like ALZA, bears parts of Zaffaroni's first and last names, stands for Molecular Delivery Corp., and the firm is focused on neurological and psychiatric diseases.

"We're looking beyond that, but you can imagine those would be areas where rapid onset would be important," said Alan Frazier, managing partner of Frazier Healthcare Ventures, of Seattle, which co-led the $45 million round. Frazier has joined the board of Alexza.

Although the company's main technology will involve delivery, Frazier said backers prefer to think of the firm as pharmaceutical.

"Alex has been studying this for a long time," Frazier told BioWorld Today. "The scientists have been pounding away at it for about three years, and he got really serious about it a year or so ago," although not much has been made public.

"We're kind of moving from stealth [mode] to mini-stealth," Frazier said.

Specifics of the technology being developed were not disclosed.

The other co-leader of the round was Versant Ventures, of Menlo Park, Calif., and the financing included Alloy Ventures, of Palo Alto; Burrill & Co., of San Francisco; CMEA Ventures, of San Francisco; New Enterprise Associates, of Menlo Park; and Zesiger Capital Group, of New York.