By Kim Coghill

Washington Editor

Integrative Proteomics Inc., a year-old drug discovery company based in Toronto, raised $25 million in its second round of financing.

Proceeds will be used to accelerate the company¿s core capabilities in mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, said John Mendlein, IPI¿s chairman and CEO.

¿We use those techniques to determine the function and structure of pharmaceutically important targets, and our first hot area is in antibacterials, and later this year we plan on doing human gene families,¿ he said.

IPI, a private company, raised $8 million last August in its first round of financing. The company was founded through the merger of Toronto companies Borealis Biosciences Inc. and Chalon Biotech Inc., and currently employs 45 people. The firm has proprietary technology for high-throughput protein expression and purification, protein-protein interaction and 3-D structural determination.

¿This is a very exciting area in terms of structural biology and drug design,¿ Mendlein told BioWorld Today. ¿We believe we are one of the leaders in the area, and we take a very different approach than other companies, in that we integrate a number of technologies together in order to quickly determine target function and structure, and then use that information to advance our internal chemistry programs.¿

IPI recently entered a collaboration and license agreement with Aurora Biosciences Corp., of San Diego, to generate a set of 3.5 million ¿data points¿ at Aurora¿s discovery facility using IPI¿s targets. Under the agreement, IPI will license Aurora¿s high-throughput Big Biology and chemistry platforms to generate biochemical and cell-based assays to screen IPI¿s targets for its structure-guided discovery programs. (See BioWorld Today, April 20, 2001.)

IPI also has collaborations with Bruker AXS Inc., Bruker Daltonics Inc. and Bruker Instruments, all of Billerica, Mass.

¿We are working with the best companies in the world to build a platform and to advance our own international drug discovery program,¿ Mendlein said. ¿Within a year of inception of the company, we already have our own drug discovery programs within IPI and that¿s pretty remarkable ¿ building a high-throughput platform and at the same time already gearing up on our own drug discovery program.¿

Participants in this financing included Aurora, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., Bruker AXS and Bruker Daltonics. Other participants were Lombard Odier Immunology Fund, of Geneva, Switzerland, an existing investor in IPI, and two new investors, Genesys Capital Partners Inc., of Toronto, and HBM BioVentures, of Switzerland.

In May, IPI said it completed a first-pass interrogation of proteins responsible for intracellular functions in staphylococcus. The company analyzed more than 1,700 genes and manufactured nearly 1,000 different bacterial proteins in sufficient quantity and quality to interrogate their function and structure.

IPI scientists reconstructed a functional network of proteins and identified hundreds of proteins that interact with each other, and began determining the three dimensional structure of the proteins.