AxoGen Receives $21 Million to Expand Sales and Develop a New Product

PDL BioPharma recently provided $21 million to AxoGen, an Alachua-based company, to expand sales and develop their products. While AxoGen focuses on creating products used in surgeries to repair nerve damage, PDL invests in biotech companies like AxoGen.

“In the current environment for where we are as a company, it’s a very nice financing for us,” said Greg Freitag, AxoGen’s chief financial officer. “It allows us to not be looking at additional financing in the near term and focus on the business.”

Originally, the company started with $1 million in investments in 2002 and has grown ever since. AxoGen’s products have been used in 400 hospitals and thousands of surgeries, including for soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of Dr. David Muir’s research from the McKnight Brain Institute at UF, AxoGen licensed the technology from the institute to develop their product. Muir is responsible for the development of a process that treats nerves with enzymes that target a protein that would otherwise prevent human donated nerves from regenerating. Before this discovery, a patient received a nerve from a different part of the body that left the patient with nerve damage.

To read the full article in the Gainesville Sun, click here.