By Brady Huggett

Genomics Collaborative Inc. closed a $36.2 million private placement and will use the funds to further push its presence in Asia and Western Europe.

"There was significant interest in this round; it could have easily gone up two or three times what it was," said Michael Pellini, president and CEO of GCI. "The company has grown so much and there are new companies starting into an area we have been focusing on for years. We believe that validates us and the investment community believes so, too."

The financing was led by Invesco Private Capital, of New York, and also included Whitney & Co., of New York; Applied Genomic Technology Capital Funds, of Cambridge, Mass.; Oracle Partners, of New York; the Economic Development Board, of Singapore, and others.

Pellini said the company had "several million" dollars on hand before the financing.

Officially, this was a Series D financing, but GCI, of Cambridge, Mass., financed its A and B Series together, raising $4 million. In September, it raised $13 million in a Series C financing, led by TL Ventures, of Wayne, Pa., but also participated in by Invesco. When it came time for the Series D, Invesco wanted to be a part of it.

"I thought we could make a lot of money at this level for my clients," Parag Saxena, managing partner at Invesco, told BioWorld Today. "We got a lot more than we planned on originally. [Genomics Collaborative] is a substantial part of the genomics jigsaw puzzle, a critical piece. I like investing in platforms because they do well no matter what. You can't do the rest of the work without doing what they do."

GCI has a drug discovery platform based on its Global Repository and GCI Discovery technologies. The repository contains tens of thousands of samples of DNA, serum and tissue representing prevalent diseases collected from populations around the world and GCI expects the repository to hold more than 100,000 samples with detailed phenotypes by the end of 2000, and approximately 500,000 by the end of 2003. GCI Discovery is a proprietary database tool for research that provides genomic and clinical information taken from the public domain and from collaborations with academic and industrial investigators.

GCI has developed a worldwide network of investigators for sourcing and analyzing genotypic, expression and proteomic data generated from the analysis of DNA and tissue samples. GCI has more than 300 investigator sites and is currently collecting data from more than 60,000 patients.

While GCI does not have firm plans for an initial public offering, it believes it is likely.

"We certainly have every intent in the future of taking this company public," Pellini said. "But that is something that could be changed by market conditions."

Pellini said the funds from the financing will be used to enlarge GCI's web of patients and the company.

"We plan to exponentially grow our physician network and we are currently recruiting 7,500 patients monthly throughout the world," Pellini said. "What you will see in the next six to 12 months is rapid growth for us in Asia and Western Europe. We already have a few projects in Africa and India, but our emphasis is on the big three markets: the U.S., Asia and Western Europe."

Pellini said partnerships and collaborations are a possibility, but for now, the idea is to stay in front.

"Many folks have invested a significant marketing effort in saying they are going to get patients for large-scale genomics projects," Pellini said. "The bottom line is that we have been quietly doing this for three years and we will use this funding to stay far ahead of the field."