OVP Venture Partners has led a $30 million venture round in Fate Therapeutics, bringing total financing in the San Diego stem cell research company to $50 million, according to Xconomy. The deal is the latest big investment by Kirkland-based OVP in a company outside the Seattle area, though Fate does have connections here given that scientific founder Randall Moon is a professor of stem cell and regenerative medicine at the Univeristy of Washington.

In fact, when Fate was founded more than two years ago, there was hope that the company would be based in the Seattle area. But the company later tapped venture capitalist Paul Grayson as CEO, and Fate later established its headquarters in La Jolla, Calif. [Update: Post updated with press release from Fate]

Xconomy reports that other investors in the round include Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners and Venrock, as well as strategic partners such as Astellas Venture Management and Genzyme Ventures. It also reports that the cash infusion will give the biotech upstart about two years of operating capital.

Leading a $30 million round is a big deal OVP, which closed a $250 million venture fund in 2007. And, as we've noted in the past, the firm appears to have taken an interest in large financing deals outside of the Seattle are in recent months.

Last month, it led a $12 million round in San Mateo, Calif.-based software security company RedSeal. In August, it participated in a $45 million venture round in Mountain View, Calif.-based Complete Genomics. That same month it led a $14 million round in Boston materials science startup Novomer and an $11 million round in Oregon chip testing firm Advanced Inquiry Systems. The month before it led a $15 million round in Limerick BioPharma, a South San Francisco biotech company.

As we've said before, it looks like OVP -- with offices in Kirkland and Portland -- will be racking up the frequent flier miles in the coming months and years.

UPDATE: Here's the press release that Fate released today:

La Jolla, CA – Nov. 16, 2009 – Fate Therapeutics, Inc. announced today that it has completed a $30 million Series B financing led by OVP Venture Partners. Joining OVP Venture Partners in the financing is a syndicate of corporate investors, including Astellas Venture Management, Genzyme Ventures and a third undisclosed corporate investor. The three co-leaders of the Company’s Series A financing, ARCH Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners and Venrock, also participated in the latest round of financing. In conjunction with the funding, Carl Weissman, managing director at OVP Venture Partners, joined the Company’s board of directors.

“Fate Therapeutics has made rapid progress in advancing its pipeline of Stem Cell Modulators and in establishing the leading industrialized platform for induced pluripotent stem cell technology,” said Mr. Weissman. “We are confident that the Company’s management team and its scientists will continue to identify novel mechanisms to selectively intervene in adult stem cell biology for medicine, and we believe its expert knowledge, innovative approach and advanced technologies in modulating cell fate can be leveraged across a broad therapeutic spectrum of drug discovery and development opportunities.”

“The leadership of OVP, the continued support of our top-tier existing investors, and the breadth of drug development and commercialization expertise of our corporate investor syndicate creates a powerful foundation for the expansion of our stem cell biology discovery engine,” said Paul Grayson, president and CEO of Fate Therapeutics. “Target populations of adult stem cells must be exquisitely characterized and quantitated, and we are employing genomic, proteomic and epigenetic expression technologies to identify cell-specific biological mechanisms to modulate cell fate for diseases that currently have limited to no treatment options.”

Fate Therapeutics is developing its lead Stem Cell Modulator, FT1050, to enhance hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) proliferation and homing. The small molecule is currently undergoing clinical testing at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in adult patients with hematologic malignancies, such as leukemia and lymphoma, who have undergone nonmyeloablative conditioning therapy and are in need of HSC support. The Phase 1b study is intended to determine the safety and tolerability of introducing FT1050 during the standard course of dual umbilical cord blood transplant and will also track HSC engraftment efficiencies and patient outcomes.

The Company’s discovery engine utilizes the most advanced reprogramming technologies for generating cell types of interest to elucidate disease biology and identify targets for therapeutic intervention. Fate Therapeutics’ protein-based reprogramming platform in combination with its novel small molecule conditions offers a highly efficient, non-viral, non-DNA based method to recapitulate human physiology for commercial scale drug discovery and therapeutic use. The Company has exclusively in-licensed from The Scripps Research Institute and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research an intellectual property portfolio related to induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, including filings that date back to November 2003.

This portfolio includes the latest techniques published by Dr. Sheng Ding in October 2009, which use three small molecules to generate iPSCs in a manner that is 200 times more efficient than and twice as fast as conventional methods for reprogramming adult human cells.

“The Company is well-positioned to aggressively advance its leading iPSC technology platform for use in its own internal discovery programs as well as with strategic partners,” said Scott Wolchko, chief financial officer of Fate Therapeutics. “With this Series B financing, we have raised the necessary funds to build on the pioneering research and foundational intellectual property of our scientific founders for human cell reprogramming and to enable the commercialization of our pharmaceutical grade iPSC technology.”