BERLIN—On May 13, German company caprotec bioanalytics GmbH, which also has a U.S. subsidiary in Burlington, Mass, announced the closing of a $5.1 million series B financing round with existing investors Creathor Venture, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft, ERP Startfonds and "well-known private investors," according to the company. The proceeds will enable further development and marketing of the company's proprietary Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry (CCMS) platform technology for analyzing complex protein mixtures.
"CCMS is a broadly applicable technology to investigate small molecule protein interactions. It enables the isolation and identification of native functionally selected proteins directly from a complex biological sample," Koster says.
"The completion of this investment round in a challenging financing environment demonstrates that caprotec, with its exceptional management and ground breaking new technology, stands out among other companies in this industry," adds Karlheinz Schmelig, managing director at Creathor Venture.
The CCMS technology from caprotec was developed by Dr. Hubert Koster, founder and CEO of caprotec bioanalytics GmbH, as well as founder of Biosyntech GmbH, reportedly the first biotechnology company in Germany—and co-founder of U.S. company Milligen/Biosearch and founder of Sequenom.
"Having such committed management, employees and shareholders is and will be essential for caprotec´s success story," notes Ute Mercker, Prokuristin at IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft.
The analysis of complex protein mixtures plays a pivotal role in life sciences today, caprotec notes, and protein biomarkers are important diagnostic tools. Therapeutic efficacy is based on the interaction of a drug with its target protein, and adverse side effects are the result of drug interactions with toxicity-causing proteins. "These are the areas in which CCMS will have a significant impact," Koster points out.
The company's CCMS technology has, caprotec reports, "proven to be superior to widely used pull-down technologies such as affinity chromatography, affinity beads and immuno precipitation. The affinity-based interaction with the protein mixture is performed in solution, and the Capture Compounds form a covalent bond with the affinity-captured proteins so that even weakly-interacting proteins are not lost."
This reportedly results in the isolation and identification of more functionally selected proteins from a significantly smaller biological sample size. Moreover, membrane proteins, which are otherwise very difficult to analyze due to their low water-solubility and low abundance, are said to be accessible with caprotec's CCMS technology.
The proceeds from this financing round will be used to further develop caproKits as tools for the worldwide research and development community to identify functionally selected protein classes and the company's ImproMed application to profile drug-protein interactions, generating the information to structurally optimize the drug molecule for increasing efficacy and reducing adverse side effects.
"Overall CCMS can address one of the most daunting issues of the pharmaceutical industry: the high attrition rate, which results in the lengthy time and high cost of drug development," the company maintains.
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