By Matthew Willett

Syrrx Inc. completed a $54 million Series C private placement led by Lombard Odier & Cie, of Geneva, Switzerland.

The placement, announced Monday at the J.P. Morgan H&Q Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, included Bay City Capital, of San Francisco; Chemicals and Materials Enterprise Associates, of San Francisco; CIBC World Markets, of New York; Cooper Hill, of New York; Invesco Global Health Science Fund, of Denver; Jaspers; MPM Asset Mangement, of San Francisco; Versant Ventures, of Menlo Park, Calif.; and Wanger Asset Management LP, of Chicago.

In its second round of financing in October of last year, Syrrx raised $20 million. (See BioWorld Today, Oct. 4, 2000.)

To date, the company has raised more than $79 million from investors.

Syrrx identifies protein structures from genetic information, then uses that information to identify drug candidates. Wendell Wierenga, CEO of Syrrx, said the company will use the funding to gain competencies toward integration as a full-scale drug discovery company.

"We'll continue to build the automation and miniaturization tools and put them in place so that we can do the high-throughput gene structuring in basically a factory mode of production," Wierenga told BioWorld Today. "In terms of integrating, we'll shortly begin building the chemistry capacity in the organization toward adding the high-throughput screening and establish capacities in the area of early development biology and preclinical development to evaluate discovery candidates out of high-throughput production, structural determination."

He said the company also will pursue revenue from partnerships. "We'll really seek two kinds of partnerships that will be essential in the coming year: discovery partnerships with big pharma and/or biotech companies, and technology-based partnerships that will allow us to expand our overall reach, moving from gene information to drug discovery."

After the financing, Wierenga said, the company has about $70 million in cash on hand.

"This will take us through the end of 2002," Wierenga said. "We've already raised about $25 million, and spent about $11 million of that in total, so we've got close to $70 million, and with our business plan that will take us through until 2002. It's an aggressive business plan, and we anticipate revenue from partnerships as well as additional space requirements. That will be a part of our spending as well."