By Karen Young
Staff Writer
Caliper Technologies Corp. spun out a new company, Amphora Discovery Corp., which has raised $25 million in venture capital funding. The new company also entered into agreements for another $10 million investment.
Amphora was formed to create and commercialize a database of chemical genomics information for use in preclinical drug discovery to accelerate target validation and lead identification. Another goal for the database is to increase the success rate of drugs through clinical development. The chemical genomics database will include a collection of information about significant aspects of a library of small molecules and their interactions with therapeutic targets.
Amphora is independent form Caliper, with its own management team and board of directors. Calipers ownership is about 25 percent, although it has put no money in the company, said Jane Green, senior director, corporate communications for Caliper, of Mountain View, Calif. Amphora will be building its chemical genomics database with an exclusive license to use Calipers LabChip high-throughput screening systems, designed to accelerate the identification, optimization and development of clinical candidates.
We believe and Amphora believes that this is a very big idea, and that this could become a very important and successful company, Green said. But its a very different company and business model from Calipers, and the only way that Amphora could have the resources to be successful would be for it to operate as an independent company with separate funding [and a] separate management to implement those corporate strategies.
Caliper could never have dedicated the necessary resources to Amphora had that company stayed within Caliper, she said.
Current investors include Arch Venture Partners, of Chicago; California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS); CW Group, of New York; MPM Asset Management, of San Francisco; OrbiMed Advisors LLC, of New York; Venrock Associates, of New York; and Versant Ventures, of Menlo Park, Calif.
Amphorma, of Research Triangle Park, N.C., with an office in Mountain View, will sell the database to pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms and laboratories in academic centers. The company also plans to sell analysis tools and licenses to proprietary compounds and targets.
Amphora will make its money through subscriptions, [although] they will be commercializing other aspects, such as sales of reagents, Green said. But predominantly, thats the commercial structure.
Amphora will have a direct relationship with Caliper as a customer, with Caliper selling the new company instruments, chips, services and custom-chip design solutions as it may need them. In the initial period, Caliper also will be providing administrative support, which Amphora will pay for at customary rates.
But Amphora will be responsible for commercializing its own products, Green said.
As the company builds its database, Green said it may turn to third-party suppliers for the various components of the business, for example, informatics tools or chemical agents that would comprise the database.
Caliper said that while technology has dramatically increased the rate of genomics, functional genomics and high-throughput screening, these efforts have not resulted in an increase in speed or a decrease in cost of drug discovery programs. Amphoras database will catalogue the interactions between chemical drug candidates and targets, which will provide a bank of knowledge about characteristics of potential drugs. One of the barriers to industrializing chemical genomics efforts with conventional technology, the company said, is the imprecision, inaccuracy and lack of comprehensiveness of screening information.
The database, according to the company, in addition to the LabChip exclusive agreement, includes a chemical library, a collection of high-quality compounds that will be optimized for diversity and drug-like properties, as well as for specific activity against classes of clinically interesting targets. The selection of biological targets will be based on their relationship to target classes that are important in disease states, that are affected by therapeutic intervention and that can provide information related to selectivity or toxicology in humans. And the Amphora database will be bundled with cheminformatics and data-mining tools.
LabChip technologies, or microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology, enables complex experiments to be conducted on a small chip. LabChip products rely on manufacturing methods from the microchip industry with expertise in fluid dynamics, biochemistry and software and hardware engineering to develop miniature, integrated biochemical processing systems, according to Caliper.
Amphora will be led by CEO Martin Haslanger, former president of Sphinx Laboratories, part of Eli Lilly and Co. Haslanger has more than 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical discovery with companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., of New York, and Schering Plough Corp., of Madison, N.J. William Janzen, formerly director of lead generation technologies and operations at Sphinx, will be responsible for establishing and managing screening operations. Janzen also is a past president of the Society for Molecular Screening.
Michael Knapp, Caliper founder and vice president of corporate development, initiated the Amphora project in 1997. Knapp brought Nicholas Hodge on board in 1998 as director of drug discovery technologies to develop the database concept. Hodge will join Amphora as vice president of corporate development.