By Matthew Willett

Triad Therapeutics Inc. raised $30 million in a Series B financing led by CSFB Private Equity to fund its efforts at developing novel chemistry technologies for drug discovery.

The San Diego-based company focuses on developing "smart" chemistry platform technologies to accelerate small-molecule discovery and also on structural proteomics. Triad CEO Stephen Coutts said Triad's Integrated Object-oriented PharmacoEngineering (IOPE) technology can cut lead identification time from years to weeks.

"It's a validation of what we've achieved in a little under a year's work in our new facility," Coutts said of the financing. "We've gotten proof of principle and shown that our technology really works to get to a high-affinity and high-specificity inhibitor quickly. We can take the target from the customer and come back in four to eight weeks with something that really starts their program off with a bang, something with specificity and affinity at a high speed."

The financing, led by the private equity arm of the Credit Suisse Group, of Zurich, Switzerland, also included International Biomedicine Holdings, of San Francisco, and new investors Invus Group, of New York; 511 Equities, of New York; and Yasuda Development, of Tokyo.

Other first-round investors who participated in this financing included Skyline Ventures, of Palo Alto, Calif.; H&Q Life Science Investors, of Boston; Mediphase Venture Partners; J&J Development Corp.; GeneChem Technologies Inc., of Montreal, and Lombard Odier & Cie, of Zurich.

Coutts told BioWorld Today the funding from the oversubscribed offering - Triad initially planned to raise about $20 million - gives the company an opportunity to expand in several directions.

"We're at 35 employees, and we want to double that in the next year and double again beyond that," he said. "We want to grow substantially this technology that currently finds molecular solutions for a family of proteins at a time. At this point we can only work on one family at a time, but we'd like to expand that to work on three gene families at a time."

Further, he added, Triad, of San Diego, plans to enter the drug discovery field in the near term.

"The other thing is that we think we can identify some targets of our own and develop our own drugs, then take them to the clinic and at that point license them or whatever," he said.

"Since the technology is specialized for enzymes it can take any indication, and we're looking at anti-infectives initially, since there's such a rich literature there in the public domain. We can go after a lot of information and a lot of targets validated that are in the public and the literature, so we're picking some of those and looking at screening," he said.

Moving targets into the clinic, however, is costly business. To that end Coutts said the company has initial public offering aspirations.

"It's so uncertain what the market is going to do," he said. "If I had to guess, I'd say we're looking at it about 15 to 24 months away. We want to have several deals consummated that will demonstrate the power of the technology and swing from that to the market."