Heidelberg, Germany, March 18, 2003 - Cellzome today announced the completion of its Series C funding at a total of approximately 30 Million Pounds. Lead investor, INVESCO Private Capital, was joined by Biofrontier Partners, SG Asset Management, Yamanouchi Venture Capital, as well as existing investors Advent International, Atlas Venture, Index Ventures, Heidelberg Innovation, Schroder Ventures Life Sciences, Sofinnova Partners and Stelios Papadopoulos.
Under the leadership of President & CEO, David Brown, Ph.D, Cellzomeis moving rapidly into drug discovery. Cellzome's innovative drug discovery process systematically matches medicinal chemistry to the proteome and proteins to disease pathways, thereby driving a more productive drug development pipeline. "Achieving our funding targets in such a difficult market has further validated the Cellzome value proposition," said David Brown. "Our goal is to increase radically the rate at which drug targets and chemical leads can be identified, a key issue for the pharmaceutical industry, by integrating our expertise in proteomics and medicinal chemistry."
Cellzome's integrated technology break through in large scale proteomics is being fully exploited by capitalizing on the pharmaceutical industry's accumulated medicinal chemistry knowledge.
Cellzome probes the human proteome with existing drugs and withdrug-like molecules using its drug pulldown technology to identify new target/lead pairs on a large scale. This addresses the key bottleneck in drug discovery because the identified targets then have chemical ligands which can be used both to validate the target for medical use and as leads for optimization. Target and lead are identified in a single step.
Targets identified may be recognized as those of current Pharma interest, in which Cellzome proceeds immediately to lead optimization. Or the targets may be novel, in which case Cellzome uses its pathway expansion proteomics platform to identify whether the target is involved in disease pathways. CEO David Brown said, "Earlier successful generations of drug discoverers usually started with a chemical lead. Often, nature's ligands were used to probe biological systems and targets and leads emerged inparallel. Cellzome's approach is similar but with the added power of exploiting our new knowledge of the human proteome."
Cellzome's technology allows cost effective, scalable drug pulldowns and pathway mapping from a broad variety of different cell types and tissues. A world-class mass spectrometry capability guarantees quality controlled, highly sensitive protein identification. A strong, customized IT infrastructure enables efficient sample and data management. Excellent bioinformatic annotation allows in-depth interpretation of the rapidly growing Cellzome data set for the identification of Lead/Target pairs.
Cellzome's therapeutic strategy is based on the role of cellular pathways in human diseases. The vast majority of modern pharmaceutical targets map onto a limited number of cellular pathways with therapeutic validation. These cellular pathways are not yet fully elucidated and can be mined further for novel tractable targets. Cellzome has completed two disease focussed projects, mapping fully all proteins in the Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) pathway and in the TNF-alpha pathway. These are pathways at the forefront of pharmaceutical industry investigation. By fully mapping these pathways and identifying novel components, a number of new tractable targets can now enter drug discovery. "Cellzome has tuned this pathway mapping capability to the point where we can now economically map all disease pathways of interest to the the Pharmaindustry," said David Brown. "This allows a company to tie up all IPon targets and identify the best targets to parallel process throughdrug discovery. The ability now to have multiple shots on goal in these key disease pathways gives a significant competitive advantage."
Cellzome's areas of disease focus include inflammation, Alzheimer's, cancer, metabolic diseases and antifungals. When used in tandem, Cellzome's drug pulldown and pathway mapping technologies give a particularly powerful approach to identification of new target/ lead pairs.
"Cellzome has always been an impressive company, but what caught our attention in particular during this round was the vision that the firm is aggressively pursuing under the experienced drug discovery expertise of Dave Brown," said Parag Saxena, President and Managing Partner of INVESCO Private Capital.
Dr. Brown joined Cellzome in September of 2002, taking over from the firm's initial founder and former CEO, Charles Cohen, Ph.D., who moved into the role of Chairman. Previously, Dr. Brown served as Global Head of Discovery at Roche Pharma in Basel, Switzerland, overseeing the output of drug candidates from approximately 2,000 scientists across Roche's five research sites.
Dr. Brown has extensive experience in leading research and development initiatives from its early discovery phase through clinical trial process in major disease areas. Over his 28-year career, he has worked at four of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, including Roche Pharma, Pfizer Inc., GlaxoWellcome and Zeneca. At Roche, in addition to his role of leading discovery, Dr. Brown served on the committee that oversaw the company's clinical drug development and was also a member of the business development team responsible for in-licensing products and for finalizing technology agreements and acquisitions. While at Pfizer, Dr. Brown was a co-inventor on the patent for Viagra(R) and led the team that developed the blockbuster drug through to clinical efficacy in man.
The entire Cellzome team brings together a powerful combination of scientific excellence, pharmaceutical industry leadership experience and biotech industry financial expertise. "From the first day that Spryos (Artavanis-Tsakonas), Charlie (Cohen) and I met these scientists at the EMBL in Heidelberg, we knew we had found a winning team. Cellzome combines the highest quality people and unique scientific capabilities with the vision and drive to be a global player," said Stelios Papadopoulos, Ph.D., Vice Chairman, SG Cowen.
The funds raised in this round will be used to fund R&D and proof-of-concept studies. SG Cowen was the placement agent.
About Cellzome
Cellzome is a drug discovery company leveraging the interface between validated disease pathways, tractable medicinal chemistry and druggable targets. Cellzome systematically matches medicinal chemistry to the proteome and proteins to disease pathways, thereby driving a de-risked and more productive drug R&D pipeline.
The company was founded in May 2000 by a team of scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The company currently has approx. 100 employees with offices in Heidelberg, Germany and London, U.K. To learn more about Cellzome visit www.cellzome.com.