Bone-Rad Therapeutics Inc., a Corona del Mar-based healthcare technology company, is seeking $5 million, $2 million to conduct preclinical activities and to prepare its application with the Food and Drug Administration to perform clinical trials, and $3 million to obtain the required certification to sell its product in Europe.
The company is developing a cancer treatment called Spine-Rad Cement that targets spinal tumors in the bones with local radiation, with the concurrent goal of restoring bone strength to the affected vertebrae, said Joyce Keyak, co-inventor and principal investigator at the University of California-Irvine.
Spine-Rad Cement is a permanent implant. Bone Rad plans to start marketing it in Europe before it’s approved for use here.
“Unfortunately, this is what it takes to improve patient care in the U.S.,” Keyak said. “That’s the bad part. The good part, which should attract investors, is that once it’s approved, there will be little competition and a huge market in the U.S.”
VR Firm Ramps Up
An Irvine-based company that’s involved in the virtual reality industry is seeking $450,000 to complete its seed round. PipelineVR is developing an online marketplace platform to match hardware and software vendors with companies interested in developing virtual and augmented reality components.
A pharmaceutical company such as Pfizer Inc., for example, would use PipelineVR to find vendors to help it develop VR experiences that could be used as an alternative to prescription drugs to treat conditions like depression, PipelineVR founder and Chief Executive Matthew Papish said.
Pipeline monetizes its service by charging each vendor $50 to bid on a project and be directly connected with the interested party.
Papish launched Pipeline in 2015 and raised $350,000 early on from his own investments, friends and family, he said. The funds are being used for a private beta test before a general release, which is expected in the second quarter of next year, he added. The $450,000 will be used for hires and ramping up sales, among other uses.
As a longtime Los Angeles-based executive in digital media and a self-described “serial entrepreneur” who sold an L.A. startup he founded, Papish decided to place PipelineVR’s headquarters in Orange County on the advice of a “well-known and successful” Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain anonymous, Papish said.
That person’s advice was to set up shop near UCI, based on the tech talent coming out of the university. He heeded that advice and put his headquarters at The Cove, the physical space of UCI’s innovation institute, Applied Innovation in University Research Park.
Papish said he’s most well-known as creator and executive producer of “Blind Date,” a syndicated TV show that ended its run in 2007, and as head of branded entertainment for AOL. About three years ago, he said he came to the conclusion that VR would be “huge” in business segments, such as real estate, automotive and healthcare.
To follow through on its commitment to UCI, PipelineVR has sponsored some computer science and informatics classes at the university. That entails the company assigning a project to UCI seniors who want to get hands-on experience in the corporate world.
Media Honors
A company incubated at Chapman University’s Launch Labs incubator received seven American Advertising Awards from the American Advertising Federation in the categories of music videos and elements of advertising.
23FIFTN is a visual media company that creates content via photos, videos and graphic design. Since its founding in early 2015, it’s branched out to create entire campaigns and handle their placement in social media. Its primary clients are hip-hop and electronic dance music artists. The company name comes from combining the addresses of the houses the co-founders lived in while attending Chapman.
The three co-founders—Reed Matthews, Karam Gill and Daniel Malikyar—met on Chapman’s soccer team.
Gill wrote a documentary that premiered in March at South by Southwest in Austin about Warren G, a hip hop artist and one of the company’s first clients. He shot to fame in the early 1990s as a member of the Long Beach hip-hop trio 213, which also featured Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg.
23FIFTN got Warren G as a client after they took photos of him performing at The Observatory in Santa Ana and sent them to his manager. They impressed the manager enough that he asked the company to do a music video for Warren G, Matthews said. The video got 2.5 million views on Worldstarhiphop.com in its first 24 hours, he added.
After the video gained so much attention quickly, 23FIFTN was hired by other artists, such as Marshmello and A$AP Rocky, to create music videos for them, Matthews said. The company also launched Fujifilm camera X-T2 with a video campaign displayed on Jumbotrons in Times Square throughout last year’s holiday season.
The three co-founders each put in $500 to launch the company, Matthews said. Revenue last year was about $250,000.
