A small Raleigh drug company won regulatory approval for its first product today, a pain patch for cancer patients.

Winning Food & Drug Administration approval for the patch, known as Onsolis, puts BioDelivery Sciences International in a select class of Triangle pharmaceutical companies with actual products on the market.

The patch contains fentanyl, a morphine-like drug, and can deliver a quick dose of pain relief.

BioDelivery's Swedish partner, Meda AB, has previously said it expects U.S. sales of Onsolis to top $200 million a year. Meda agreed in 2007 to pay BioDelivery as much as $90 million plus royalties for rights to sell the product in North America.

Winning FDA approval will trigger a $12 million payment from Meda to BioDelivery.

BioDelivery's stock rose 45 cents to $6.45 this afternoon. The stock has nearly tripled in the past year.

A Morrisville drug company co-founded by UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp said Tuesday that it has raised $18 million in funding in spite of a slowdown in venture financing.

The company, Viamet Pharmaceuticals, plans to use the money to move its treatments into clinical trials. Viamet, which employs six, targets a specific class of enzymes called metalloenzymes that contain a metal, typically zinc or iron.

About 10 percent of drugs on the market today work because they shut down the activity of key metalloenzymes, said Robert Schotzinger, Viamet’s CEO. The technology Viamet is developing promises to improve existing drugs, making medicines safer and more effective, he said.

Viamet was founded in 2005 by Thorp and Thomas O’Halloran, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University. The company last raised money in June 2007 in $4 million Series A round.

The Series B funding announced Tuesday was led by the Novartis Option Fund and Lilly Ventures. Existing investors who also participated included Intersouth Partners and Hatteras Venture Partners, both of Durham.

Lilly Ventures, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Co., “invests in companies with promising technologies that have the potential to generate multiple, ‘best in class’ products,”  Managing Director Ed Torres wrote in a statement. “We believe that Viamet represents just such an opportunity.”

A Cary company developing a new type of antidepressant and other experimental medicines has raised $9 million to continue research on its products.

CeNeRx BioPharma also used some of the money to buy the rights to an early stage compound that could be developed into treatments for degenerative nerve diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The economic downturn "allowed us to bring in a very exciting compound at a reasonable price," said CeNeRx CEO Barry Brand.