Cetek Secures $14 Million in Private Funding to Build Natural Product Drug Discovery Engine.Business Editors and Health/Medical Writers BIOWIRE2K MARLBOROUGH, Mass.--(BW HealthWire)--Oct. 10, 2001 Cetek Corporation announced today that it has closed on a $14 million private equity financing Equity Financing The act of raising money for company activities by selling common or preferred stock to individual or institutional investors. In return for the money paid, shareholders receive ownership interests in the corporation. to discover new natural product drug candidates using its patented capillary electrophoresis Capillary electrophoresis (CE), also known as capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), can be used to separate ionic species by their charge and frictional forces. In traditional electrophoresis, electrically charged analytes move in a conductive liquid medium under the (CE) screening technology. Investors included Stata Ventures Partners, John and Stephen Davis, Gainesborough Investments, and James L. Waters. "Natural product chemistry is largely unexplored, yet has been the source of over 40% of all pharmaceutical compounds on the market today," stated James L. Waters, Chief Executive Officer of Cetek Corporation. "We are working to unlock this vast reservoir of novel compounds by applying Cetek's expertise in extract screening, compound isolation, structure determination and automation. Our business strategy is to identify a number of high-quality, novel drug leads that may be further developed at Cetek or licensed to 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. for milestone and royalty payments." "Cetek is a unique drug discovery company that applies automation and engineering to highly sensitive Adj. 1. highly sensitive - readily affected by various agents; "a highly sensitive explosive is easily exploded by a shock"; "a sensitive colloid is readily coagulated" and robust technologies to solve many of the bottlenecks in the drug discovery process," stated Ray Stata Ray Stata is a cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Analog Devices, Inc.(NYSE: ADI).[1] A native of Pennsylvania, Stata earned BSEE and MSEE degrees from MIT. In 1965 he founded Analog Devices with MIT classmate Matthew Lorber in Cambridge, Massachusetts. of Stata Ventures and Founder and Chairman of Analog Devices Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI) is an American multinational producer of semiconductor devices. Analog specializes in ADC, DAC, MEMS, and DSP chips for consumer and industrial goods. Analog is presently designing circuits in the 65 nanometer to 3 µm process feature sizes range. . "The management team has a proven track record of building successful businesses in life sciences, including Cetek's proprietary high throughput CE Assay." Cetek has demonstrated that its core CE Assay is able to efficiently identify and rank the affinity of synthetic and natural product small molecules to therapeutic target proteins in a high-throughput environment. Cetek has screened over 6 million compounds against 120 targets in the last two years of operation. Cetek has doubled its screening capacity over the last three months to accommodate increased demand in contract screening and to accommodate demand from the Cetek Natural Product program. Ongoing screening collaborations at Cetek include: Pharmacia, Genome Therapeutics, Millennium Pharmaceuticals Millennium Pharmaceuticals NASDAQ: MLNM is a biotechnology company based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area of the United States of America. Founded in 1993, the company conducts research in various scientific areas, currently focusing on inflammation and oncology. , Microcide Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson and Schering-Plough plus others in North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , Europe and Japan. Cetek's Natural Product Engine There are four key components that make Cetek's Natural Product program unique within the drug discovery industry. First, Cetek's capillary electrophoresis technology is unmatched in its ability to look deeper into natural extracts than other technologies and identify and isolate unique, strong binding drug candidates. Second, Jim Waters has developed a new generation high-throughput fractionation fractionation /frac·tion·a·tion/ (frak?shun-a´shun) 1. in radiology, division of the total dose of radiation into small doses administered at intervals. 2. system that works in parallel with the CE technology to rapidly isolate the drug candidates from the natural product extracts. Third, Cetek is building high-throughput compound structural analysis and identification capability in conjunction with Professor and Cetek founder Barry L. Karger of Northeastern University's Barnett Institute. Finally, these three components will be integrated into a factory environment by Cetek's engineering group for high-throughput screening High-throughput screening (HTS), is a method for scientific experimentation especially used in drug discovery and relevant to the fields of biology and chemistry. Purpose and method , isolation and identification of novel natural product structures that modulate To insert a data signal into a carrier wave or direct current. See modulation. therapeutic targets in multiple disease areas. Priming this factory is Cetek's unique collection of natural product extracts that will comprise over 30,000 extracts by the end of 2002. Cetek Corporation is a drug discovery company that is unlocking new reservoirs of natural compound diversity for the creation of novel therapeutics. Cetek integrates expertise in automation, engineering and novel strategies in natural product chemistry to utilize its capillary electrophoresis technology as a highly sensitive and robust technology for high throughput screening and compound isolation. Cetek also employs its automated CE Assay(TM) to provide contract research for pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners to advance their own synthetic and natural product drug discovery programs. Visit Cetek's website at http://www.cetek.com. |
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