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February 20, 2002 - Target Discovery Inc. Secures $4.6 Million In Series A Financing
Proteomic technology developer Target Discovery today announced it has raised in excess of $4.6 million in Series A financing. The company is developing breakthrough proteomics platform technologies for the comparison and identification of differences in the protein makeup of healthy versus diseased tissues. Target Discovery’s largest investor, Clayton A. Struve, was joined by other private angel investors from the Chicago area to provide funding that will enable the company to extend the full tissue-level demonstration work and proprietary instrumentation platform development, integration and optimization work that is now underway.
Target Discovery’s innovative technologies for protein separation, quantitation and identification far exceed the performance capabilities of today’s current methods, primarily 2-D gels and mass ladder sequencing. The company’s Multi-Dimensional Capillary Electrophoresis and Inverted Mass Ladder Sequencing technologies facilitate 100-fold improvements in speed for determining protein sequence tags, and in sensitivity and precision for the detection and quantitation of proteins. The technologies also allow potential analysis of the full breadth of the proteome, versus only 30 percent for 2-D gels. Target Discovery technologies will provide the high quality proteomics databases required to facilitate effective in-silico biological systems modeling. The company is positioned to capture a share of the $50 billion spent annually on new drug research and development because its technologies overcome performance, cost and time limitations of current methods. Target Discovery’s intellectual property portfolio includes ten patents pending, with the first patent on high speed protein sequencing already allowed for issue.
“The breadth of interest and support received from our angel investors allows us to expand the development of our technologies, which are designed to facilitate better and earlier decisions in pharmaceutical development and to accelerate and improve the probability of creating blockbuster products,” said Jeffrey N. Peterson, chief executive officer of Target Discovery. Peterson will be introducing Target Discovery at the BIO CEO & Investor 2002 Conference being held in New York City beginning today. He is also targeting $7 to $15 million in institutional funding in order to accelerate Target Discovery’s demonstration and commercialization efforts, information technology (IT) infrastructure development, and operational scale-up.
"Pharmaceutical companies are under intense pressure to accelerate the speed and especially the effectiveness of their drug development pipelines. I expect that Target Discovery’s enabling technologies will have a powerful impact on the identification of new drug targets," said investor Struve. "More importantly, I am excited by the potential for Target Discovery’s technologies to produce high quality, thoroughly complete proteomics databases, which will improve the understanding and modeling of diseases and will optimize the development of new drugs." Struve is CEO of CSS LLC, a securities trading firm based in Chicago, and previously was a managing director of Swiss Bank and a partner at O’Connor & Associates (acquired by Swiss Bank). He serves on Target Discovery’s board of directors.
Target Discovery was founded in 1999 by Peterson and Dr. Luke V. Schneider, who currently serves as chief scientific officer. Peterson has diverse multi-function, multi-business and international experience in senior management roles with Abbott Laboratories and General Electric businesses and holds bachelors and masters degrees in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schneider founded and directed the Upconverting Phosphor Diagnostics and Combinatorial Methods Centers at SRI International and holds five technical degrees including a doctorate in chemical engineering from Princeton. Target Discovery is supported by a scientific advisory board constituting leaders in mass spectrometry, protein chemistry and capillary electrophoresis from Mayo Clinic, City of Hope, Stanford University, and San Jose State University. Steven Rauscher, CEO of Genome Therapeutics, rounds out Target Discovery’s board of directors with Struve, Peterson and Schneider.
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