Achillion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
300 George Street, New Haven, CT

It was 1999 when Bill Rice came to a meeting at Yale University in an effort to advance the new drug discovery technology he had pioneered at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Frederick, Md.  The institutional investor that seeded his new business had backed away, and the pharmaceutical company that was to have been his business partner suddenly was acquired by a larger company. His family had exhausted most of its personal financial resources.  But Dr. Rice had a vision of a completely new type of drug that could counteract drug resistance in diseases such as HIV and he was hoping that Connecticut Innovations would see his vision, too.

Having come from a family of entrepreneurs, Dr. Rice possessed several requisites for success: the ability to develop a workable strategy, run a business and manage risk. Connecticut Innovations saw this potential, and provided a $150,000 seed investment to enable Dr. Rice to relocate his new company to Connecticut and raise initial capital.   Over time, Connecticut Innovations invested a total of $5.8 million in Achillion and provided $1.7 million in financing through its BioScience Facilities Fund to fit our laboratory space in New Haven for the growing company.  In 2006, Achillion successfully closed an IPO with net proceeds of $55.3 million.  Today, Achillion is an innovative biopharmaceutical company dedicated to bringing important new treatments to patients with infectious disease.  The company has three major products in development for infectious disease and an important partnership with Gilead Sciences.

www.achillion.com