Accelerator, the Seattle business incubator for life science companies, has helped bankroll ideas from CalTech, Iowa State and the University of Washington.

Today, it is announcing an investment in Recodagen Corp., a cancer research spin out from Washington State University.

Carl Weissman

Carl Weissman, president of Accelerator, declined to disclose the specific amount. But he said the money was within the $2 million to $5 million range that it typically invests in early-stage companies.

It marks the seventh investment for Accelerator, which was founded in 2003 and now counts among its backers Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners and WRF Capital.

Recodagen was founded by J. Suzanne Lindsey, a former professor in the department of pharmaceutical sciences at WSU. Lindsey recently relocated to Seattle to run the business, which has set up shop in Accelerator's lab space in the South Lake Union neighborhood. It is among dozens of startup companies attempting to develop new cancer treatments.

"There's a lot of adverse side effects with current therapies and we wanted to be able to target the tumor cells specifically," said Lindsey, who prior to WSU was an assistant professor at Texas Tech.

The company, which has an exclusive license from WSU, has discovered a protein that may stop the spread of cancer by targeting the invasive properties of cancer. Dubbed MIG-7, or migration inducting gene, the protein was discovered from the so-called junk DNA.

"Cancer cells are only lethal when they invade and cause the tumor to become malignant," said Weissman. "This gene is what causes cancer cells to become invasive, so if you block the protein that this gene expresses, then you can stop the cancer from becoming invasive. Therefore it does not metastasize and you don't get the spread all over the body."

Recodagen represents an exciting opportunity because researchers may be able to find other genes within the junk DNA that can developed into unique proteins for other diseases, said Weissman.

"As an investment thesis, that means everything we find is going to be novel and there is not going to be any prior intellectual property on it," he said.

The company has filed patents around the MIG-7 protein.

At this point, Recodagen is three to four years away from putting a drug into clinical trials.

Though the investment marks the first time that Accelerator has invested in a WSU spin out, Weissman said that alone is not significant.

"We just want to be able to find the very best emerging biotechnologies anywhere in the world," he said. "And this just happened to emerge in Pullman."