By Karen Young

MitoKor, a private drug discovery and development company focused on mitochondrial biology, raised $25 million in a private equity financing.

The San Diego-based company¿s chairman and CEO, Walter Moos, said the money would be used to advance its mitochondrial discovery and development efforts.

¿We have a number of products in various stages of preclinical and clinical development, and we need to take them to the next stage,¿ Moos said.

The new financing should take MitoKor into 2003, Moos said, which will allow it to continue its focus on late-onset neurodegenerative and CNS diseases.

The company has an alliance with American Home Products Corp., of Madison, N.J., which gave MitoKor an undisclosed Phase III drug for Alzheimer¿s disease, but it will be several years before the trial is expected to be completed, Moos said.

In May, MitoKor acquired Apollo Biopharmaceuticals Inc., a private company based in Cambridge, Mass., and Apollo had the existing alliance with AHP, which continued. (See BioWorld Today, May 10, 2001.)

MitoKor¿s lead internal product, ABP-150, is in Phase I trials for Parkinson¿s disease and other forms of chronic neurodegeneration. ABP-150 is a non-feminizing estrogen that is believed to affect mitochondrial metabolic pathways, and also was obtained through MitoKor¿s acquisition of Apollo.

MitoKor recently said its three-year collaboration with Pfizer Inc., of New York, was extended. The collaboration focuses on the discovery of novel targets and therapeutics based on mitochondrial dysfunction. Established in November 1998, the collaboration called for MitoKor to identify novel molecular targets and to develop screens to discover potential drug candidates for therapeutic intervention in neurodegenerative diseases. Financial terms were not disclosed.

RBC Capital Markets, of Toronto, acted as a placement agent for the financing. New investors include Federated Kaufmann Fund, of New York; Orbitex Health and Biotechnology Funds, of New York; Palladin Group, of Maplewood, N.J.; China Development Industrial Bank, of Taiwan; First Bio Venture Capital, of Taiwan; Emerging Growth Management Funds, of San Francisco; and DRW Venture Partners, of Minneapolis.

MitoKor¿s largest existing shareholders also participated, including Alta Partners, of San Francisco; Forward Ventures, of San Diego; Domain Associates/3i Bioscience Investment Trust, of Princeton, N.J.; MDS Capital Corp., of Toronto; and S.R. One, of Philadelphia.