NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – German firm Caprotec Bioanalytics today announced it has raised €1 million ($1.4 million) in a Series B round.
The second closing brings the total amount raised in the round to €5 million in equity, Caprotec said. The company announced it had raised €4 million in the Series B round last year.
LBBW Venture Capital led the current tranche, and was joined by existing investors Creathor Venture, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft, ERP Startfonds, and private investors.
According to Hubert Köster, CEO of Caprotec, the funding allows the firm to leverage its Capture Compound Mass Spectrometry platform technology into additional markets as diagnostics and enables the company to execute "several large pharma partnerships," simultaneously.
The CCMS technology is based on tri-functional molecules called capture compounds, and can be used to define and confirm drug targets and to discover off-target proteins that cause side effects.
Harald Poth, senior investment manager for LBBW Venture, said that the technology could address the most expensive problem in new drug development, the failure of candidates in clinical trials due to off-target interactions.
"With Caprotec's functional proteomics platform, it is possible to profile small molecule drug-protein interactions, including membrane proteins in the human proteome to reveal possible off-target proteins causing adverse side effects early in the drug development process and to use that information to structurally optimize the drug candidates," Poth said in a statement.