National Editor

In a round led by a board member and private investor, Target Discovery Inc. pulled down another $2.4 million in its Series A financing round, bringing the total upward of $7 million.

Clayton Struve, CEO of the Chicago-based securities firm CSS LLC, led the round, which will support the upcoming launch of three product lines and boost the development of related platforms.

"We're going commercial for the first time," said Jeffrey Peterson, CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Target Discovery. Founded in April 1999, the company focuses on reagents and software for the comparison and identification of differences in the protein makeup of healthy and diseased tissues - expressional proteomics. (See BioWorld Today, March 5, 2002.)

The company said its first product offerings are expected to expand capabilities in electrophoretic separation of biomolecules and quantitative expression comparison of protein targets or biomarkers, along with high-speed protein identification.

Target Discovery's multidimensional capillary electrophoresis and inverted mass ladder sequencing technologies are said to hold the potential for 100-fold improvements in sensitivity over current methods using 2-D gels.

Out of the gate and into the market this week, Peterson told BioWorld Today, will be EOTrol, the trademarked name for a line of dynamic coatings for capillaries that are used in separations processes such as electrophoresis.

"It's something you include in the buffers for materials you're dealing with in the separations, and it coats the inside walls of capillaries," he said, adding that the coating substance - a proprietary formulation - can reverse electro-osmotic flow, which has been a problem in doing such procedures. "When you're doing these kinds of separations, that force drains things out the capillaries much too fast" for exact measures to made, Peterson said.

Pricing has yet to be established.

"The first [product] is reagents, probably complemented by some software in the next few months, but they are not specifically interactive with each other," he said. The next two products will consist of reagents with accompanying software.

"We refer to ourselves as a discovery biology company, because of the span of technologies we've been developing," which has come to encompass interactional proteomics and metabolomics, Peterson said.

"If you look at the entire drug discovery process as we know it today, the analogy I use is that it's like waging a war," he said. "Battles are fought on many different fronts. A lot of observers will argue the war' is not going very well at this point - the cost has been spiraling upward for four decades, and testing burdens are growing and growing. It isn't a pretty picture. And because you don't have confirmed understanding of pathways, you're having to test the daylights out of things you don't understand."

Target Discovery is hoping to help end the "confused wild goose chases" and "illuminate the full horizon" with its technologies.

"You can't just expect to mine this tidal wave of data and find the answers," Peterson said. "You have to use theory, the hypothesis-and-test approach."

He said the company "ended up doing three rounds" in its Series A financing. The latest round was "all with our existing investor pool, but we brought in some California investors for the first time," he said.

The series is finished except for "$1 million worth of stock I could put up for sale, and I'm having my arm twisted to do that now," Peterson said.

Work for four years on six platforms has yielded nine primary U.S. patent filings, he said. The first two patents have issued, two more have been allowed and are on the verge of issuing, and two more are about to be allowed.

"Development of the intellectual property estate has gone very well," he said.