Founded a little over a year ago with the aim of developing therapeutics for chronic pain, Solace Pharmaceuticals Inc. closed a $15 million Series A round to advance its initial clinical and preclinical programs.

The Boston-based company, which was put together by PureTech Ventures and a group of pain experts, is working specifically to address chronic neuropathic and inflammatory pain, conditions for which existing treatment options generally are limited to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which include the beleaguered COX-2 inhibitor class, and opioid drugs. Solace's goal is to harness new scientific developments to target the underlying mechanism causing pain, rather than just masking the symptoms.

With its first venture capital round - the company received undisclosed seed funding when established in March 2006 - Solace anticipates that it has adequate funding for "a good three years," said Eliot Forster, a former Pfizer Inc. executive who recently joined Solace as its CEO. With New York-based Pfizer, Forster oversaw development in Europe and Asia and was involved in the development of several pain drugs ultimately commercialized by the big pharma firm, including Lyrica, Relpax and Celebrex.

"I'm thrilled to have this opportunity," Forster said of his position with Solace, adding that the start-up firm has a "great foundation" of investment and science.

So far, the company has remained tight-lipped about its lead program, though Forster told BioWorld Today that it's "a novel treatment of pain" that has demonstrated evidence "strongly supporting" its efficacy. Solace is preparing to start a Phase II trial with that compound.

The company has been more forthcoming about its second program, a preclinical compound designed to inhibit BH4. That drug's mechanism was highlighted last fall in a paper in published in Nature Medicine. The paper's author, Clifford Woolf, who also is co-founder and chair of Solace's scientific advisory board, found that genes needed to produce tetrahydrobiopterin, or BH4, were up-regulated in injured animals, and that reducing BH4 levels relieved both neuropathic and inflammatory pain. (See BioWorld Today, Oct. 27, 2006.)

Money from the Series A round is expected to get both of those programs "to the next significant milestone," Forster said.

Beyond that, Solace will continue building a "pipeline of medications in the pain space," he added. That will be achieved through the combination of developing "a good in-house pipeline" and selective partnership opportunities.

At this time, Forster is the company's sole full-time employee, and the intent is to keep Solace operating on a virtual basis, with minimal infrastructure, for as long as possible.

In addition to Woolf, who is the Richard Kitz Chair of Anesthesia Research at Harvard, the scientific advisory committee at Solace includes: Allan Basbaum, a professor of anatomy at the University of California in San Francisco; Bruce Bean, a neurology professor at Harvard; Joyce DeLeo, the professor of pharmacology and anesthesiology at Dartmouth; Roy Freeman, neurology professor at Harvard; Lee Simon, professor of rheumatology at Harvard; and Tony Yaksh, professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology at the University of California in San Diego.

Solace's Series A round was co-led by Waltham, Mass.-based Polaris Venture Partners and Menlo Park, Calif.-based InterWest Partners, with participation from Boston-based PureTech Ventures. Chris Ehrlich, of InterWest, and Kevin Bitterman, of Polaris, joined the company's board, which also includes Forster, as well as Frank Douglas and Daphne Zohar, both of PureTech.