caprotec bioanalytics closes EUR 4 million Series B Financing Round

caprotec bioanalytics GmbH today announced the closing of a EUR 4 million ($5.1M) Series B Financing Round with existing investors Creathor Venture, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft, ERP Startfonds, and well-known private investors. The proceeds will enable further development and marketing of the Company's proprietary CCMS (Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry) platform technology for analyzing complex protein mixtures.

caprotec's CCMS technology was developed by Prof. Dr. Hubert Koster, founder and CEO of  caprotec bioanalytics GmbH, as well as founder of Biosyntech GmbH, the first biotechnology company in Germany, co-founder of US company Milligen/Biosearch and founder of Sequenom ( SQNM).

"CCMS is a broadly applicable technology to investigate small molecule protein interactions. It enables the isolation and identification of native functionally selected proteins directly from a complex biological sample," stated Prof. Koster.

Karlheinz Schmelig, Managing Director at Creathor Venture commented, "The completion of this investment round in a challenging financing environment demonstrates that caprotec, with its exceptional management and ground breaking new technology, stands out among other companies in this industry."

Ute Mercker, Prokuristin at IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft stated, "Having such committed management, employees and shareholders is and will be essential for caprotec´s success story."

The analysis of complex protein mixtures plays a pivotal role in life sciences today, and protein biomarkers are important diagnostic tools. Therapeutic efficacy is based on the interaction of a drug with its target protein, and adverse side effects are the result of drug interactions with toxicity-causing proteins. "These are the areas in which CCMS will have a significant impact," stated Prof. Koster.

The company's CCMS has proven to be superior to widely used pull-down technologies such as affinity chromatography, affinity beads and immuno precipitation. The affinity-based interaction with the protein mixture is performed in solution, and the Capture Compounds form a covalent bond with the affinity-captured proteins so that even weakly-interacting proteins are not lost. This results in the isolation and identification of more functionally selected proteins from a significantly smaller biological sample size as has been demonstrated in several peer-reviewed publications in leading scientific journals. Moreover, the important class of membrane proteins, otherwise very difficult to analyze due to their low water-solubility and low abundance, are accessible with caprotec's CCMS technology.  

The proceeds from this financing round will be used to further develop caproKits™ as tools for the worldwide R&D community to identify functionally selected protein classes and the company's ImproMed™ ("improved medicines") application to profile drug-protein interactions, generating the information to structurally optimize the drug molecule for increasing efficacy and reducing adverse side effects. Overall CCMS can address one of the most daunting issues of the pharmaceutical industry: the high attrition rate, which results in the lengthy time and high cost of drug development.