West Coast Editor

In a time when funding can be as elusive as the ivory-billed woodpecker, Cellomics Inc. came up with a $15 million round of financing led by one of its earliest corporate friends: Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH, a maker of precision optics.

Cellomics, which is focused on functional genomics and calls itself a "knowledge extraction" company, said it would use the funds to continue evolving its High Content Screening systems for drug discovery, research and testing.

"We have our present products, our first generation, and like most technologies in biotech, it has to get faster, it has to get smaller and it has to get smarter," said Lansing Taylor, president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Cellomics.

Zeiss joined forces with Cellomics in 2000 to design, engineer and manufacture the KineticScan HCS Reader and KineticScan HCS Workstation. Part of the Oberkochen, Germany-based Carl Zeiss Group, Zeiss also supplies the optical sub-assembly for the ArrayScan HCS Reader, and engineers and manufactures other products, including binoculars.

In February, Zeiss issued a press release saying that its hunt for the ivory-billed woodpecker - believed to be extinct - ended without a sighting. The Zeiss team tape recorded in Louisiana some distinctive double tapping on a tree that, at first, sounded like the rare bird, but a thorough search of the area turned up only the pileated woodpecker, which is common. A group from Cornell University was looking, too.

Cellomics is looking for other things, such as a partner for its "pharmacocellomics" program.

"It's patient cell profiling, and we're starting with cancer," Taylor told BioWorld Today. "We want to use our platform and somebody else's juice."

Meanwhile, although a chance at an initial public offering flitted away from Cellomics in 2000, the company had its products to see it through.

"We were lucky in that regard," Taylor said. "There wasn't a field of cellomics, with a small c,' until a couple of years ago when people started listening to our song and dance."

Now, the discipline is seen as identical to the firm itself, whose technology integrates fluorescent reagents, kits, cell lines, multiparametric assays, instrumentation (both fixed end-point and kinetics systems), and informatics tools, with the aim of speeding the drug discovery cycle. Cellomics says its products are used by the world's top 15 pharmaceutical firms.

"All of this will ultimately be miniaturized," Taylor said. "We didn't start there, but we have a patent on what we call the cell chip - miniaturized arrays of cells. The biology will stay the same, the reagents will evolve and the informatics will be the same."

The new money provides an important boost, he added.

"In the past six months, I spent every day and night on financing issues," Taylor said. "Today, I spent all day on business issues. Our focus is to zero in on going from an advanced start-up to becoming a profitable bio-tools company."

Other investors in the latest financing round include Oxford Bioscience Partners, of Boston; InterWest Partners, of Palo Alto, Calif.; Vector Fund, of Deerfield, Ill.; Alta Partners, of San Francisco; and Axiom Ventures, of Hartford, Conn.