BioWorld International Correspondent

Alligator Bioscience AB raised SEK51 million (US$7.4 million) in a new share issue to advance its pipeline of internal drug candidates, bringing its total funding to SEK165 million since its foundation in 2001.

The Lund, Sweden-based company is privately held but has a base of about 150 shareholders. Several new investors joined the latest round, including Norwegian firm Home Capital AS, Swedish East Bay Holding AB and Malmsten Invest AB, of Stockholm. Alligator Bioscience CEO Gun-Britt Fransson told BioWorld International that the company aimed to undergo an IPO in about two years.

Alligator was spun out from antibody discovery and development firm BioInvent International AB, also of Lund, to commercialize an in vitro protein evolution technology - dubbed FIND (fragment-induced diversity) - originally developed at the University of Lund by Carl Borrebaeck and colleagues. It relies on single-stranded DNA fragmentation and recombination steps in order to eliminate superfluous variants that can occur when working with double-stranded DNA.

"We keep the two strands separate so they never recombine to the wild-type protein," Fransson said. The technology can be applied to any therapeutic or diagnostic protein - it can be used as part of the discovery process, for improving existing molecules or for rescuing proteins that have failed in clinical trials due to unwanted side effects. Alligator also has developed a variation of the technology - called FindBind - for optimizing the binding characteristics of monoclonal antibodies.

Initially, the company has focused mainly on external alliances and research assignments, including projects with Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer Healthcare AG, and London-based AstraZeneca plc. "We have used the last five years to establish and evolve the technology and to prove the technology, to show that it works," Fransson said.

More recently, it has begun work on building a proprietary drug pipeline. It does not intend to take those into clinical development, however, but aims to out-license them after demonstrating proof of concept in animal models.

The first such molecule will be ready for out-licensing soon. "It's a protein that is important in acute inflammation," Fransson said. The protein, a variant of a Staphylococcus protein, is being developed for treatment of reperfusion injury following myocardial infarction, arterial bypass surgery and organ transplant. A second protein in preclinical development has potential application in treating rheumatism. It works by blocking the interleukin-1 (IL-1) receptor.