Drug discovery firm Ansaris has received a $1.7 million investment to further development of therapeutics with oncology, immunology and inflammatory targets, according to a regulatory filing.
The filing was made under the name of Ansaris’ parent company, Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Locus Pharmaceuticals Inc.
The latest debt funding brings to $118 million the total amount the company has raised since its inception in 2000, including a $30 million round in 2007, CEO Joan Lau said.
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The funding was sourced from Ansaris’ existing investors, which include Prism Venture Partners, HBM BioVentures Ltd., and SR One, the venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline.
“It shows our investors’ confidence in what we’re doing now,” Lau said, though for competitive reasons she was reluctant to provide specifics on what, exactly, it is that the company is doing now.
“We are working on extraordinarily challenging targets that are confidential to us and our partners,” she said.
Ansaris’ model is to partner on drug discovery with pharmaceuticals and biotech firms, as well as do its own in-house development via its fragment-based drug design technology. Fragment-based design is based on identifying small chemical fragments, which may bind only weakly to the biological target, and then growing them or combining them to produce a lead with a higher affinity.
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Last year, Ansaris entered into a “mulit-year, multi-target” research partnership with Switzerland-based drug giant Novartis, Lau said. Japan-based Ono Pharmaceutical is another of the company’s partners, and Ansaris is always looking to strike more co-discovery deals, Lau said.
Ansaris has 24 employees, most of whom are Ph.D. scientists, specializing in fields such as biology and medicinal chemistry. The company is “actively seeking” applications from “good computational chemists,” Lau said.
Photo from flickr user Daniel Morrison
