NEW YORK, June 27 - Japanese pharmaceutical company Fujisawa has made an undisclosed equity investment in Quark Biotech (QBI), the companies said Wednesday.
The investment is meant to accelerate the two companies' current collaboration, which dates to April 1999, Fujisawa said in a statement. At that time, Fujisawa agreed to pay research fees and milestone payments valued at $19 million for QBI, a genomics-based biopharmaceutical company based in Chicago, to discover genes related to stroke and develop drugs that target those genes.
"The financial investment by Fujisawa is a tremendous affirmation of our mission to apply QBI's powerful genomic technology platform to the creation of promising new medicines for difficult-to-treat diseases, such as stroke," said Daniel Zurr, chief executive officer and founder of QBI, in a statement.
QBI also has research collaborations with other pharmaceutical companies, including Sankyo and Taisho Pharmaceutical, both based in Tokyo, to apply its gene expression and protein profiling technologies toward identifying drug targets and developing pharmaceuticals. QBI's research facilities are located in Israel and Chicago.