Akceli, Inc. Secures $6.5 Million in Series A Funding; Company Launches Breakthrough Cellular Systems Technology to Accelerate and Enhance Drug Discovery and Development Processes.Business/Technology Editors CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 18, 2002 Akceli, a cellular systems biology Systems biology, a field of study in the biosciences, focuses on the systematic study of complex interactions in biological systems. Particularly from 2000 onwards, the term is used widely in the biosciences, and in a variety of contexts. company, today announced the completion of its Series A venture funding of $6.5 million. The company will use the funding to develop and exploit its transfected cell microarray technology, invented by Whitehead Institute Founded in 1982, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research and teaching institution located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Whitehead Institute was founded as a fiscally independent entity from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its members Fellow and company co-founder David M. Sabatini, M.D., Ph.D. The financing was led by Atlas Venture Atlas Venture is an international early-stage venture capital firm that invests in communications, information technology, and life sciences companies. Atlas Venture has investing offices in Boston, London, Munich, and Paris, and its investments are evenly divided between the , with a significant investment from Apple Tree Partners. "Akceli's high throughput cell assay platform will enable novel applications all the way from target validation to lead optimization and toxicology," said Jean-Francois Formela, life sciences principal at Atlas Venture. "The company's aim is to enter platform infrastructure partnerships while also driving proprietary high content, high throughput screening programs." "Akceli provides one of the key missing components in drug discovery today - high content cellular readouts as to how drugs interact with protein targets in natural-occurring extracellular extracellular /ex·tra·cel·lu·lar/ (-sel´u-lar) outside a cell or cells. ex·tra·cel·lu·lar adj. Located or occurring outside a cell or cells. and intracellular compartments and pathways," added Martin Vogelbaum, general partner, Apple Tree Partners. "The inherent modular and multi-parallel aspects of the Akceli technology will enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies Top 100 Biotechnology Companies The following is a list of the top 100 biotechnology companies ranked by revenue. The first nine companies qualify for the list of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies. to simultaneously observe the dynamic and kinetic profiles of their compound libraries in a single assay system." Akceli's patent pending, reverse transfection trans·fec·tion n. Infection of a bacterium or cell with DNA or RNA isolated from a bacteriophage or from an animal or a plant virus, resulting in replication of the complete virus. technology enables significant productivity increases and quality enhancements throughout the drug discovery and development process. The company creates cell microarrays that significantly increase lab efficiency and reduce the time needed to conduct pharmaceutical research. "This round of funding provides Akceli with the resources to develop and exploit its cell microarray technology," said David M. Chao, co-founder and president of Akceli. "The addition of Atlas Venture and Apple Tree Partners to our team also provides an external validation of our technology by an extremely strong group of investors." Exclusively licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Cambridge; coeducational; chartered 1861, opened 1865 in Boston, moved 1916. It has long been recognized as an outstanding technological institute and its Sloan School of Management has notable programs in business, , Akceli's core technology enables researchers to test, in parallel, the effects of drugs on a panel of cell clusters, each of which is over- or under-producing a specific protein. In a miniaturized format, researchers can now study drugs and their interactions with all of the proteins in the genome simultaneously. In addition, potential drugs can be tested against 100 or more targets simultaneously, enabling researchers to identify promising compounds and cures faster and with greater accuracy. About Akceli Akceli is a cellular systems biology company using a transfected cell microarray technology to accelerate the drug discovery process. Akceli's patent pending technology - reverse transfection - is a broad and powerful new platform for understanding cellular pathways and networks. Made via reverse transfection, Akceli's transfected cell microarrays provide insights into the function of genes, proteins and compounds across the entire human genome The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is composed of 24 distinct pairs of chromosomes (22 autosomal + X + Y) with a total of approximately 3 billion DNA base pairs containing an estimated 20,000–25,000 genes. and enable significant productivity gains throughout the drug discovery and development process. Key applications of the technology include selectivity testing of lead compounds on a genome wide scale and high throughput screening with 100 or more targets in parallel. Founded in 2001 by a team of scientists from MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Biomedical research (or experimental medicine), in general simply known as medical research, is the basic research or applied research conducted to aid the body of knowledge in the field of medicine. , Akceli is backed by leading venture capital firms Name Location Founding date Managing Partners/Directors Specialty Capital managed 5AM Ventures Menlo Park, CA; Waltham, MA 2002 John Diekman, PhD (managing partner), Scott Rocklage, PhD (managing partner), Andrew Schwab (managing partner) life sciences $200M [1] Atlas Venture and Apple Tree Partners. Akceli is headquartered in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass. Additional information about Akceli can be found at www.akceli.com. |
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