BioWorld International Correspondent

Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG added another €3.5 million to a Series C round, pushing the total raised to €37.2 million (US$55.6 million) and taking the company's total funding to date to €48.9 million.

The additional cash was raised from ATS Beteiligungsverwaltung GmbH, of Munich, Germany, which also had participated in the first closing. "Technical reasons" required its total investment to be paid in two tranches, Rainer Wessel, CEO of Mainz, Germany-based Ganymed, told BioWorld International.

The company aims to move its first "ideal" monoclonal antibody (iMab) into a Phase I/IIa clinical trial in metastatic gastric cancer next year.

"That is planned right now for the second half of 2008," Wessel said. The antibody targets a tumor-specific antigen, GC182, which is expressed in 80 percent of gastric cancers and in smaller percentages of pancreatic cancers, esophageal cancers and non-small-cell lung carcinomas. The protein is expressed in gastromucosal cells but not in the stem cells that give rise to them, the company said. Its function is not fully understood yet.

"We have certain ideas about it, but some of them are still confidential," Wessel said.

A second preclinical antibody, targeting an antigen called GT468, is slated to enter the clinic a year later. The precise indication has not been finalized, but the target is expressed in 80 percent of breast cancers, 60 percent of NSCLCs and 20 percent of ovarian cancers, the company said. The protein is expressed during embyronic development. "It plays a certain role in the Akt [signaling] pathway, and right now we're dissecting its role further," Wessel said.

Ganymed, which was spun out from the universities of Mainz and Zurich in 2001, uses a combination of in silico and wet lab methods to identify tumor antigens that are expressed uniquely in cancer cells. It then engineers monoclonal antibodies that employ all the immune effector functions of classical antibodies, including antibody-dependent complement lysis, which is lacking in several well-known antibody-based cancer therapies, as their targets also play important roles in healthy tissues.

So far, it has identified about a half-dozen such targets, one of which, GT43, it has out-licensed to Copenhagen, Denmark-based Genmab A/S. The company plans to develop antibodies against the others in-house, Wessel said, but it could be open to out-licensing deals.