BioWorld International Correspondent
Atlas Antibodies AB, a newly formed spinout from Sweden's Human Proteome Resource (HPR) program, raised an undisclosed level of seed funding to commence operations.
"We have enough money to start up the company and run it for two to three years," CEO Marianne Hansson told BioWorld International. The Stockholm-based company is founded and chaired by HPR leader Mathias Uhlén, one of Sweden's best-known scientists, who has established several other firms, including Uppsala-based Pyrosequencing AB, now called Biotage AB, and Bromma-based Affibody AB.
The new firm has two lines of business, both of which are derived from ongoing work on the HPR's Human Protein Atlas (HPA) initiative. It is selling collections of polyclonal antibodies that are specific for individual proteins, and it is engaged in the discovery and development of novel biomarkers for diagnostic and, eventually, therapeutic applications in oncology.
The HPR received SEK450 million (US$62.1 million) from the nonprofit, Stockholm-based Wallenberg Foundation to build a public domain map displaying the expression and localization of human proteins in cancerous and normal tissues, as captured through immunohistochemical staining.
Uhlén and colleagues have developed a high-throughput method for generating specific antibodies against so-called protein epitope signature tags (PrEST). Those are individual protein fragments, typically comprising around 100 to 160 amino acid residues, which have a low level of homology to sequences found in other proteins and which can be expressed easily in recombinant bacteria. They elicit the production of a repertoire of polyclonal antibodies directed against a specific protein, with very low cross-reactivity with other proteins.
The company's antibody products also are polyclonal. "We believe the polyclonality is a good thing," Hansson said. "They are validated against a lot of human tissues, and the results are available." Moreover, because the antibodies are ultimately generated from genomic sequences rather than from known and isolated proteins, the company can provide antibodies that recognize unknown proteins.
The current version of the atlas comprises more than 400,000 histological images of antibodies that recognize 718 unique proteins, located in samples of 48 types of normal tissue and 20 types of cancerous tissue. The tissue samples were obtained from 144 individuals without cancer and 216 patients with cancer. On Oct. 30, Uhlén told BioWorld International, Version 2.0 of the atlas will be unveiled.
"That will contain more than 1 million images," he said. Its coverage will extend to 1500 proteins and also will include images derived from multiple human cell lines, as well as tissue samples.
Some 80 scientists are working on the project full time, he said, and another 150 researchers are contributing to it. The HPR center is managed from Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), where Uhlén is professor of microbiology. It has eight contributing centers in total, including sites in South Korea, China and Germany. The aim and other similar international initiatives, Uhlén said, is to map some 8,000 proteins by the end of 2009. "We hope that within 10 years we will have antibodies to all the human proteins."
Atlas Antibodies has adopted an unusual ownership structure. Thirty-two percent of its equity is held by the newly established HPR Foundation, which will plough a share of its future profits back into proteomics research at the participating universities, KTH and Uppsala University.
A founding consortium of 54 scientists also holds 32 percent, while seed investors Investor Growth Capital, the venture capital arm of the Stockholm-based industrial holding company Investor AB, and Scandinavian Life Science Venture, also of Stockholm, hold a combined 30 percent. The remaining 6 percent is owned by the holding companies of KTH and Uppsala University.