Cambridge biotech start-up secures £1million - News - Life Sciences - Business Weekly

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Cambridge biotech start-up secures £1million

Written by News Desk
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Dr Eddy Littler, Domainex CEO Cambridge based Domainex, a biopharma spin-out from University College London, has raised £1 million from Longbow Capital LLP, which specialises in healthcare and technology investments, and The Capital Fund. Business Weekly exclusively flagged up the probability of the fundraising in January. Longbow invested £790,000 - bringing the total it has invested in the company to £1.15m - with The Capital Fund pumping in £250,000. Domainex is a contract research company specialising in the provision of structural biology and chemistry services to major pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. It is also developing a pipeline of pre-clinical drugs and targets. The vast amount of information available in the post-genomic era means that many highly attractive protein targets are now known to the pharmaceutical industry but lack of protein prevents their use in drug discovery. Domainex has closed this ‘discovery gap’ with its unique Combinatorial Domain Hunting (CDH) technology which enables the cloning and expression of proteins, or parts of proteins (domains), from challenging molecular targets. The proteins are then screened to select soluble, stable protein domains that are ideal reagents for use in drug discovery programmes. Domainex has already used its CDH protein expression platform to successfully tackle a series of difficult target proteins and has fulfilled commercial contracts with a number of major pharmaceutical companies, such as leading global firm, UCB. Dr Eddy Littler, Domainex CEO, said: “It is an achievement to have attracted this investment in a challenging fundraising environment. Our objective now is to realise the full value of our unique biology and build a portfolio of targets that we will out-license to clients – at an early stage, in the case of key reagents and X-ray crystal structures, and at a later stage with our associated lead series of inhibitors.” Domainex’s portfolio will have an initial focus on targets for cancer treatments and the company has started to discuss these targets with pharmaceutical companies with a view to future out-licensing. Set as favorite Bookmark Email This Hits: 606 Trackback(0) TrackBack URI for this entry Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Show/Hide comments Write comment Show/Hide comment form This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.