By Mary Welch

Novirio Pharmaceuticals Ltd. raised $12.5 million in a private placement of preferred stock in order to take two products into Phase I studies.

"We have two lead candidates that are in very-late-stage preclinical development that we are very excited about for hepatitis B," said Bruno Lucidi, president and CEO of Novirio. "This will allow us to take them into the clinic and take them to the next step. It also shows that our investors have confidence in us and are very happy with our work."

The private placement was led by TVM Techno Venture Management, of Boston. Other investors included MPM Asset Management LLC, of Cambridge, Mass.; Nomura Securities International plc, of New York; and BB BioVentures LP, of Cambridge. MPM was the company's initial investor and remains its largest shareholder.

Novirio, which is based in Cambridge and Paris, has two candidates for its hepatitis B program that will enter clinical trials next year. Its second hepatitis B candidate has shown activity in both hepatitis B and HIV.

"We applied for a name but we haven't heard yet," said Lucidi. "So we call them NV-02 and NV-03."

The company's lead candidate, a nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitor called NV-01, entered Phase I trials this year for the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Also in the preclinical stage is a portfolio of active nucleoside analogues, a series of non-nucleoside analogues and a discovery program for HIV integrase inhibitors. The company is also focused on selecting compounds for the treatment of hepatitis C.

"We don't believe that single-agent therapy will be enough in fighting hepatitis and our compounds have the potential to expand and improve the limited options that are currently available today," Lucidi said.

Late last year, the company raised $12 million in seed capital. The new enterprise has several executives with extensive experience in developing antiviral drugs, particularly in the HIV area. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 23, 1998, p. 1.)

Lucidi, for instance, was head of the virology efforts in Europe for New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., when it launched the HIV drugs Videx (ddI) and Zerit (d4T). Its vice president of medical affairs is Maureen Myers, former director of infectious disease research at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., a subsidiary of Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, of Ingelheim, Germany, and headed clinical development when the company developed Viramune (nevirapine), the first non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor for HIV.