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By Alexander Haislip 
SAN FRANCISCO (Private Equity Week) - Newton, Mass.-based NKT Therapeutics is looking for ways to subdue Natural Killers and now has $8 million in fresh funding to do that. The company last week raised its first round of venture capital funding from SV Life Sciences and MedImmune Ventures to help it develop treatments for asthma and other diseases. The company focuses on researching so-called "Natural Killers T-Cells," which the company describes as a central component of the human immune system, playing a role in human health and disease. In asthmatics-which afflicts an estimated 20 million people in the United States-Natural Killers play a very different role, waging war on otherwise normal lung tissue. "By selectively activating or depleting the function of NKT (Natural Killer T-Cells), NKT Therapeutics' approach has the potential to treat a wide range of important diseases and provide new avenues for vaccine creation," says investor Michael Ross, a managing partner at SV Life Sciences. Researching Natural Killer cells could have applications beyond the treatment of asthma. Other targets for NKT's developing technology are the treatment of cancer, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases and dermatitis. "NKT has already created an early stage pipeline of therapeutic leads against multiple targets," says Joseph Amprey, a senior managing director of MedImmune Ventures. The $8 million infusion will allow the company to continue its research and start to develop treatments. "I am very excited," says NKT CEO Robert Mashal, who was previously an investment partner at Boston Millenia Partners, a venture capital firm, where he focused on investment opportunities in life sciences. Mashal should be excited. Biotechnology has been a tough industry during the past several years, especially for small companies. Biotech companies typically raise a lot more early stage money than startups in the software or Internet industries. To help pay for staffing, research, laboratory equipment installations and extensive product testing, it's not unusual for a biotech company to raise $50 million or more from venture capitalists before it turns to the public markets to raise additional funding. The public markets haven't been particularly kind to biotech startups. Just one venture-backed biotech company managed to go public in 2008. Bioheart Inc., which raised $40 million in venture funding before it launched an $88 million IPO last year, has lost 85 percent of its offering price since it went public.
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