Procognia raised $23.5 million in November 2004 to launch a protein array product line and expand its glycoanalysis business
Procognia, a biotechnology company that specialises in glycoanalysis and protein function arrays, has raised new financing totalling $23.5 million.
Participants in the round included lead investor Apax Partners Funds, other existing investors Evergreen Partners and Koor CVC, and new investor Star Ventures.
Procognia has also concluded an exclusive agreement with Sigma Aldrich to market novel arrays of functional human proteins developed by Procognia.
The marketing agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed, will significantly expand Sigma's pipeline of products for the advancement of proteomic research.
Procognia has developed proprietary technology to create the first arrays of biologically related human proteins that will function as if they were still in the body.
The first array Procognia will release will contain the normal human p53 protein and its polymorphic variants.
In healthy cells p53 protein suppresses tumor growth, but cancer can result when changes to the protein reduce its ability to carry out this function.
Procognia's arrays containing the normal protein and many of the sequence variants will enable researchers to analyze the functions of all these proteins in parallel to study how cancer progresses.
These arrays have the potential to enable the discovery of drugs that can restore normal p53 function to the cancer causing variants.
A pipeline of additional protein arrays, which will be launched in the coming months, will contain selected sets of biologically related human proteins, including collections of proteins associated with key diseases including cancer, protein kinases and signal transduction.
The funding will also be used to expand Procognia's proprietary glycoanalysis technology, which enables the rapid assessment of sugar molecules attached to proteins during their synthesis in cells.
These sugar molecules often determine the stability and clinical efficacy of protein therapeutics.
Procognia's glycoanalysis technology facilitates the discovery, development and manufacture of high quality therapeutic proteins.
Commenting on today's announcement, Amos Goren, director of Apax Partners, said "Procognia has made excellent technical and commercial progress during the last year.
"Apax Partners is pleased to expand its investment to assist the company in its goal to build its position as a leader in providing exceptional technical solutions and products to the research community and to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries".
Ron Long, Procognia's CEO and former CEO of Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, said: "We feel that Procognia is leading the way to changing the paradigms for biomarker and biopharmaceutical discovery with novel protein array based technologies.
"Through their expanded financing, Procognia's investors have demonstrated their confidence in our ability to develop and commercialise these technologies."
