Tuesday April 4, 7:03 am Eastern Time
Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. Completes $32.6 Million Financing
SAN DIEGO--(BW HealthWire)--April 4, 2000--Privately held Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. (``SBI') of San Diego, California successfully closed a $32.6 million Series D preferred stock financing on March 31, 2000. The total Offering was substantially oversubscribed and was expanded from an initial goal of $15 million to $32.6 million to accommodate some of the additional demand for the Offering. This new round of financing was led by Perseus-Soros BioPharmaceutical Fund, LP. Other major SBI investors included INVESCO Capital Management of Denver, Deutsche Vermogensbildungsgesellshaft m.b.H. (which was advised by AP Asset Management of Zurich), Veritas SG Investment Trust GmbH of Frankfurt, Castle Rock Capital Management of New York, New Medical Technologies of Basel, Dansk Kapitalanlaeg A/S of Copenhagen, and BioAsia Investments of Palo Alto.
ING Barings LLC, New York served as the exclusive placement agent for the Offering.
``The response to SBI's business focus has been outstanding,' said Edward T. Maggio, Chairman, President and CEO of SBI. ``As sequencing of the human genome is nearing completion, we are seeing a fundamental evolutionary shift in attention toward genome-derived protein structure and structure-based drug design. SBI is positioned to become the main source of highest quality, large-scale, proprietary 3D protein structure and structural polymorphism information for the decade `after the genome'.
``Also, it should be noted that the added proprietary information content generated by SBI as it converts gene sequences to 3D protein structures, constitutes a very real and viable response for genomics companies concerned not only about preserving, but actually significantly expanding, the value of their proprietary intellectual property assets.'
The additional funding will allow for expansion of the Company's computational science, drug discovery science, and database infrastructure in response to accelerating growth in its protein structure and structural variant database product offerings and structural data mining technologies, and expansion of its in-house drug discovery activities and drug discovery collaborations with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Perseus-Soros BioPharmaceutical Fund, LP was established by Perseus, L.L.C. and Soros Private Funds Management to make investments in life science companies developing biopharmaceutical products and creating businesses based on other advanced life science technologies. The Fund aims to provide rapidly growing companies with the capital required to complete product development and commercialization. Led by Dennis J. Purcell, who was previously Managing Director of Life Science Investment Banking at Chase H&Q, the Principals of the Fund bring expertise in private equity investing, investment banking, general management and research to the evaluation of investments and the support of portfolio companies.
Structural Bioinformatics is a world leader in computational proteomics -- the large-scale generation and use of protein structure and protein structural properties. The Company has developed advanced and proprietary computational technologies to generate highly refined three-dimensional structural models of proteins from primary gene sequence data that compare well with crystal structures, and to perform primary drug-discovery screening in silico on millions of compounds present in SBI's scaffold-specific virtual combinatorial libraries (CombiLib(TM) modules) or present in our clients' in-house compound collections.
SBI offers two subscription database products. The first, SBdBase(TM), which is composed of thousands of structural models of proteins from more than 150 distinct families, promises to accelerate lead discovery and optimization and to enable rational experimental design broadly across multiple disciplines within the pharmaceutical and life sciences. The second, SVdBase(TM), is actually a growing series of structural variant database modules each containing structural models generated from genetic polymorphisms in a single, medically important gene, such as HIV-Reverse Transcriptase or HIV-Protease. SBI's structural variant databases provide pharmacogenomic insights early-on in the drug discovery and optimization process, and facilitate the selection of optimal clinical candidates prior to initiation of clinical trials. SBI's partner in generating HIV SVdBase(TM) modules is Quest Diagnostics, Inc., the nation's leading provider of diagnostic testing, information, and services to physicians, hospitals, managed care organizations, employers and government agencies, with revenues in excess of $3 billion annually. |
