BioWorld International Correspondent

MUNICH, Germany - Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG has beaten a difficult funding climate in Germany and secured €8.85 million of venture financing in a first-round placement.

Additional public sector grants and concessions brought the level of Ganymed's backing close to €10 million, said Dirk Sebastian, the company's chief operating officer.

"Our technology and our closeness to market with our products" helped Mainz-based Ganymed succeed in a frosty investment client, Sebastian said. He estimated that the company's first products could be ready for clinical testing within 20 to 24 months.

Ganymed's CEO, Sven Rohmann, added that in addition to the technology, the company excited investors because of "the targets that we are seeking. In the past it was not possible to go for surface antigens" on tumors, but "we have found several targets that are exclusively expressed on the surfaces of tumor cells."

Current compounds have targets that are overexpressed in tumors, but that also are expressed in surrounding healthy tissue, and side effects are inevitable as tumor-destroying medicines affect nearby tissue. Ganymed's ideal targets would allow for the development of therapeutic compounds with far fewer side effects than current cancer-fighting drugs. If the company's expectations are confirmed, "We can set an effective dose and, according to theory, have no side effects. This is potentially a major breakthrough," Rohmann said.

Ganymed was founded in the fall of 2001 by scientists and oncologists from the universities of Mainz and Zurich, Switzerland, including the Nobel Prize winner Rolf Zinkernagel and his longtime colleague, Hans Hengartner. It intends to find highly selective, disease-specific targets for ailments such as multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes mellitus and Crohn's disease.

Rohmann said that pathogens have long been suspected as causes of those diseases, but no one has yet been able to identify them. Ganymed plans to develop integrated technology platforms that allow for the systematic search and comprehensive identification of antigens for those unknown pathogens, providing new avenues to address the diseases. "We have found a way to use the immune system to recognize these pathogens," Rohmann said. This line of inquiry is more daring in business terms, Sebastian said, but it held considerable long-term promise for the company.

Rohmann said that the first round of financing was "considerably oversubscribed." The company has sufficient resources to carry it through the first Phase I trials, when a second round would be raised for Phase IIb and subsuquent trials. Rohmann was optimistic that the second round would be completed at "much greater volume."

Nextech Venture, of Zurich, was the lead investor for the first round. The syndicate of life science venture capital firms investing in Ganymed includes Süd Venture Capital Investition GmbH & Co.KG, Future Capital AG, Venture Incubator AG and the Investitions und Strukturbank Rheinland-Pfalz.