Tempo Pharmaceuticals Inc. isn't wasting any time. Since its founding in late 2006, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company has raised Seed and Series A financings, licensed core technology, hired 15 employees, started partnership discussions and begun the process of translating its platform into a product fit for clinical trials.

Yet founder and CEO Alan Crane said the name Tempo refers not to the company's frenetic pace, but to the "temporal release" of multiple drugs from its Nanocell platform technology.

Crane first became interested in Nanocells in 2005, when scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a letter in Nature describing a preclinical experiment using the approach to treat cancer. The scientists had recognized problems with the growing practice of combining anti-angiogenesis drugs with chemotherapy. Specifically, the anti-angiogenesis action of shutting down tumor vasculature had been shown to prevent the chemotherapy from reaching the tumor, as well as to increase the tumor's invasiveness and resistance to treatment.

To overcome that issue, the scientists conjugated the chemotherapeutic doxorubicin to a nanoparticle and then encapsulated the entire thing in a lipid envelope filled with the anti-angiogenesis agent combretastatin-A4. The resulting Nanocell was intended to release the anti-angiogenesis agent quickly from its liposome layer, collapsing the tumor vasculature and trapping the chemotherapeutic inside the tumor, where it could effectively destroy the cancer from the inside out. The Nature experiment confirmed the hypothesis. Mice treated with Nanocells demonstrated greater tumor inhibition and significantly increased survival when compared to every other method of combining the two drugs.

Crane saw the potential of the Nanocells and joined forces with MIT scientists Shiladitya Sengupta and Ram Sasisekharan to found Tempo. The team obtained $2 million in seed money from Polaris Venture Partners, where Crane also works as a venture partner, and exclusively licensed the Nanocell technology from MIT. Last month, Tempo closed a $12.1 million Series A financing co-led by Polaris and Venrock with additional participation from Lux Capital and William Rastetter, former executive chairman at Cambridge, Mass.-based Biogen Idec Inc. and a partner at Venrock.

Robert Paull, co-founder and managing partner of Lux, said he was attracted to Tempo by the technology and the market Crane proposed. "The real novelty of what Tempo is doing is the ability to have controlled release at the nanometer scale," Paull said. "With approximately $80 billion worth of global blockbuster drugs coming off patent this year," Tempo's technology can tap into the demand for brand extensions, he added.

Crane said Tempo will use the Series A funding to translate the Nanocell platform into "a product we can move into clinical trials." He declined to specify how long that will take, but said Tempo is moving forward "as quickly as possible" and already has improved on the formulation used in the Nature experiment. The initial research is being conducted in-house, while subsequent functions such as manufacturing and clinical development will be outsourced.

Some of the financing also is being used to "explore the breadth of the program," Crane said. The Nanocells should have applicability across a broad range of solid tumors, since they target the process of angiogenesis rather than a particular tumor and thus do not require a targeting agent. Instead, size itself directs them to the tumor. At 120 nm to 200 nm, the Nanocells are too large to enter normal cells, but just small enough to slip into the holes in newly created blood vessels formed during tumor angiogenesis.

The fact that Nanocells are larger than 100 nm may make some nanotech purists cringe, but Paull, a nanotechnology specialist, was unconcerned. His definition of nanotechnology involves "precise control of properties at the nanoscale," and Tempo meets that definition by "controlling pharmacokinetics at the nanoscale," he said.

Tempo plans to internally develop and commercialize Nanocells that incorporate off-patent drugs for the treatment of cancer. The company also is exploring partnerships around the use of patented drugs in the Nanocell delivery mechanism.

Beyond cancer, the Nanocell approach may have applicability in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, which Tempo may out-license to partners.