 |
June 3, 2001
'An Assembly Line For Drug Discovery'
By Terence Chea,
Washington Post Staff Writer
The landmark mapping of the human genetic code has set off a race to
decipher the role of individual genes in disease and to use that
information to design new drugs.
In Rockville, scientists at Aptus Genomics Inc. are combining
expertise in biology, laboratory automation and information technology
to build a system to accelerate this process. Just as Henry Ford
created the first assembly line to build automobiles, Aptus scientists
are designing a system to analyze genes and discover new drugs on an
industrial scale.
"We're building an integrated process to mine and clone sets of very
important genes very quickly," said Kevin Chance, 33, Aptus's
president and chief executive. "Speed is of the essence. With the
release of the human genome sequence, the companies that can do this
quickly will be able to build a substantial intellectual-property
portfolio."
The Rockville start-up, founded less than a year ago, is finding
enthusiastic investors and expanding quickly. The firm has grown to 21
employees and next month plans to move to its own 11,400-square-foot
laboratory facility in Gaithersburg, roughly four times the size of
its current incubator space.
Last week, Aptus announced it raised $6.2 million in its first round
of institutional funding, which was led by Emerging Technology
Partners LLC, a Rockville venture capital firm that invests in
early-stage biotechnology companies. Grosvenor Funds LLC of
Washington, VitalBio LLC of Boca Raton, Fla., and MdBio Inc., a
not-for-profit organization that promotes Maryland's biotechnology
industry, joined in the financing round, which closed in April.
The company plans to use the money to expand its research and
development staff and pay for its new facility, Chance said. Over the
next few months, it hopes to hire six more researchers. He said the
company plans to expand its payroll to 30 employees by year's end and
50 by the end of 2002.
Adding the new funding to its $1.5 million in seed capital, the
company has raised a total of $7.7 million since it was founded,
enough to fund operations for the next year, Chance said. This summer,
the company hopes to raise its next round of financing, about $15
million, to fund its ambitious expansion plans.
Aptus was founded last June by Chance, an 11-year veteran of Moore
Products Co., a Philadelphia firm that was acquired last year by
German engineering giant Siemens AG. At Moore, he ran a unit that
designed automation and information technology systems for biotech and
pharmaceutical companies.
Four years ago, Chance enrolled in an MBA program for working
professionals at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School,
where he met Wei-Wu He and William Snider, who were preparing to start
a venture capital firm in Maryland that focused on biotech
investments.
"We talked about the opportunity to create a company that would take
advantage of the impending release of the human genome sequence and
help industrialize functional genomics," Chance said, referring to a
fast-growing field that involves identifying and patenting the
function of genes useful in developing new drugs and diagnostic tests.
The typical drug-discovery process involves identifying a gene,
analyzing its role in disease and looking for compounds that treat the
disease by activating or deactivating the gene. The company they
envisioned would automate this process using the latest advances in
lab automation, computer science and gene research.
"We view this as more of an engineering problem than a biology
problem," said He, chairman of Aptus and a general partner at Emerging
Technology Partners. "Aptus is using the human genome sequence to
build an assembly line for drug discovery."
Last spring, He, Snider and Chance quit their jobs to launch their
ventures. Snider and He founded the venture capital firm Emerging
Technology Partners, and Chance began setting up Aptus out of an
office in Bethesda, where he wrote its business plan and put together
its management team. In November, the company moved into temporary lab
space at the Maryland Technology Development Center, a
government-sponsored incubator in Rockville.
Aptus scientists are developing a technology platform to rapidly
identify families of genes that play an important role in disease and
to file patents on them. They are also designing a system to perform
large-scale tests to screen for compounds that act on those genes. The
company is initially focusing on genes that code for "cell surface
receptors," which are commonly used to develop drugs.
Aptus plans to form partnerships with biotechnology and pharmaceutical
companies to develop drugs based on the sets of genes it identifies.
"We're just approaching our first potential collaborators," Chance
said. "We're looking to work with collaborators to take our
discoveries to the clinic."
|
