BIND Biosciences, Inc. Receives $2M NIST ATP Award to Develop a High-Throughput Platform for Targeted Nanoparticle Engineering

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BIND Biosciences, Inc. (BIND), a privately held biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutic targeted nanoparticles, announced today that it has received a three year $2,000,000 award from the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) under its Advanced Technology Program (ATP) to further develop its platform for high-throughput formulation and selection of targeted nanoparticles.

“We are delighted to have been selected by NIST for the ATP award and for their recognition of our platform’s potential to create an entirely novel class of therapeutics based on optimally engineered targeted polymeric nanoparticles”

“Given the extremely rigorous technical peer review involved in this competition, this award represents an important validation of BIND’s technology platform,” according to Dr. Stephen Zale, Vice President of Development at BIND and Principal Investigator of BIND’s ATP project. He continued, “The ATP funding will accelerate industrialization of our high-throughput combinatorial platform for nanoparticle fabrication and screening that uniquely enables BIND to develop and manufacture targeted nanoparticle therapeutics optimized for a specific disease.”

“We are delighted to have been selected by NIST for the ATP award and for their recognition of our platform’s potential to create an entirely novel class of therapeutics based on optimally engineered targeted polymeric nanoparticles,” said Glenn Batchelder, President and Chief Executive Officer of BIND. “We are fortunate to have Dr. Zale leading this program. Dr. Zale’s two decades of pharmaceutical development experience includes a twelve year tenure at Alkermes where, as Vice President of Injectable Products, he helped build an extremely successful polymeric microparticle-based drug delivery platform which has led to the commercialization of important products such as Risperdal Consta^TM and Vivitrol^TM.”

The NIST Advanced Technology Program selects the most promising early stage technologies with the potential to create fundamental paradigm shifts in their respective spaces. Of the hundreds of applicants for this year’s ATP NIST program, less than ten percent were awarded contracts. ATP’s early stage support has dramatically accelerated the development of many innovative technologies resulting in long term commercial success and delivering far reaching societal benefits.

About BIND Biosciences, Inc.

BIND Biosciences is a privately held biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapeutic targeted nanoparticles. The company’s product-platform leverages the convergence of polymeric biomaterials, nanoparticle engineering and combinatorial synthesis to uniquely enable BIND to design and optimize targeted nanoparticle therapeutics for specific indications. BIND’s technology concentrates drug at the intended site of action while minimizing systemic exposure, thereby improving efficacy and reducing off-target effects. The company’s platform is broadly applicable across therapeutic areas with the initial product development efforts focused in cancer and cardiovascular disease. The company anticipates initiating clinical trials for their first product in 2009.

BIND was founded in 2006 by two pioneers in the field of therapeutic targeted nanoparticles, Dr. Robert Langer, MIT Institute Professor, and Dr. Omid Farokhzad, Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology. Backed by leading venture capital firms, Flagship Ventures and Polaris Venture Partners, the company has licensed a large patent estate covering these technologies on a worldwide exclusive basis from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Harvard Medical School. For more information, please visit the company’s web site at www.bindbio.com.