MAGDEBURG, Germany, Nov. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- MelTec GmbH, a topological proteomics company, today announced that it has completed its initial round of financing, raising a total of DM 38 million. The financing represents one of the largest seed financings raised by a German biotechnology company. MelTec is a new company formed as a spin-off from the Molecular Pattern Recognition research group, a department of the Medical Neurobiology Institute at the Otto von-Guericke University, Magdeburg.
Sources of funding for MelTec included a fund managed by the Volksbank Magdeburg and the community task program of Saxony-Anhalt. Additional financing was provided through BioChance, a grant program established by the German Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF). The BioChance 2000 award to MelTec is part of an annual granting program established by the German government to facilitate the commercialization of new technologies.
MelTec uses proprietary topological proteomics
technologies to identify disease-specific drug targets and drugs focused
on immune-mediated disease, cancer and arteriosclerosis. MelTec's robotic
technology reads protein networks in the context of whole cells, thereby
analyzing how protein networks encode cellular functions. Additionally,
the company develops human proteome databases, which will integrate its
protein network information with data from other sources.
Walter Schubert, M.D., founder and chief executive officer of MelTec,
said, "This initial round of funding illustrates the broad range of
support for the German biotechnology industry from risk capital, the
federal German government and local government. We at MelTec intend to use
this initial funding to accelerate our discovery and validation program
for human therapeutic targets, leveraging our topological proteomics
technology to focus on the next bottleneck in drug discovery, namely
identifying the distinct role of protein networks in cellular function and
disease states." Professor Gerald Wolf, Ph.D., Director for Research at Magdeburg
University and Head of the Institute of Medical Neurobiology, said,
"We are very pleased to see that the University's multi-disciplinary
collaborations with MelTec in the field of systems technologies is helping
explore a new level of functionality in proteomics." Gerhard Wunscher, Ph.D., from the Department of Higher Education and
Cultural Affairs at Saxony-Anhalt's Ministry for Education, Science,
Research and Technology, declared: "We are very glad that, out of a
field of 73 companies, MelTec, located in the Otto von-Guericke
University, was the only biotechnology company based in the former East
Germany, to win the BioChance 2000 award. The company's formation provides
an example of the fine cooperation between the German federal government
and the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It further illustrates that we, by making
investment grants available through community task programs, are willing
to share risk in order to support a future-oriented, private
initiative." MelTec GmbH is a privately held biotechnology company specializing in
topological proteomics. MelTec's proprietary functional imaging
technology, MELK (Multi-Epitope-Ligant-Kartographie) performs completely
automated proteomic characterization of single cells, for an unlimited
number of proteins. MelTec's technology greatly speeds and facilitates the
identification and characterization of known, or novel proteins involved
in molecular pathways. Using this technology, MelTec has already
identified new targets and drug leads in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS,
Lou Gehrig's Disease) and cancer. SOURCE: MelTec GmbH ST: Germany
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