A $1.5 million venture capital infusion in Fort Collins’ VetDC Inc. will help the CSU life-sciences startup pursue U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of its dog-cancer treatment.

The funding marks the first major investment in the company, which until now only had received a few hundred thousand dollars in seed money, said Steven Roy, VetDC’s president and CEO.

“We really needed to raise much bigger money to start the key manufacturing activities to advance this drug, called VDC-1101, toward approval,” said Roy, who left a career in business development and sales and marketing at Amgen to lead VetDC a couple years ago. “This phase was to really get us off the ground to start writing substantial checks on the manufacturing front primarily.”

VDC-1101 is designed to treat canine lymphoma, which accounts for 20 percent of cancer cases at CSU’s Animal Cancer Center. The treatment failed in human trials conducted by Gilead Sciences, but showed promise in trials on dogs.

VetDC acquired an exclusive license for the drug, which attacks cancer cells, from Gilead, an $8.4 billion pharmaceutical company that has already done much of the heavy lifting in terms