BioWorld International Correspondent

Start-up firm Kinaxo Biotechnologies GmbH raised €600,000 (US$766,000) in a seed financing round and named Schering AG as the first customer for its newly licensed KinaTor technology, which analyzes the interactions between qualified pharmaceutical leads and a cell's complete repertoire of expressed kinase enzymes.

Kinaxo, of Martinsried, Germany, was spun out at the end of last year from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, also in Martinsried, to commercialize KinaTor, which was developed by company co-founder Henrik Daub at the institute.

An earlier version of the platform previously was owned by another Max Planck Institute spinout, Axxima Pharmaceuticals AG. When that company was acquired by Martinsried-based GPC Biotech AG last year, Daub returned to the Max Planck Institute and further optimized the platform.

"We felt it would really be a pity if the technology wasn't available to pharma companies," Kinaxo CEO Andreas Jenne told BioWorld International. "We now think it's mature enough to provide it on a fee-for-service basis."

Kinaxo has obtained exclusive worldwide licenses from GPC to use the KinaTor technology in fee-for-service activities and to grant sublicenses for the KinaTor technology to third parties. Schering AG, of Berlin, is the first pharma company to sign up for KinaTor under the new ownership structure. Kinaxo is performing selectivity analyses on its behalf on Schering's small-molecule kinase inhibitors, as part of the latter's lead optimization program in the field.

KinaTor works by capturing the binding interactions between immobilized kinase inhibitors and all of their target enzymes in cell lines or tissue samples. Affinity-based separation techniques, combined with mass spectrometry, allows researchers to pinpoint all interactions a particular kinase inhibitor has with the "kinome," which numbers some 500 kinases in man.

"On paper, it looks very straightforward and simple, but to reduce it to practice is very difficult," Jenne said. "Many pharma companies tried this approach. Most of them failed, at least according to my knowledge."

The technology has multiple applications during preclinical development of kinase inhibitor drugs, Jenne said, including novel target identification, obtaining additional information about a molecule's off-target effects, mechanism of action studies and identification of new applications for "stalled" compounds.

In addition to Daub, Kinaxo's founders include Axel Ullrich of the Max Planck Institute; Hellmut Kirchner, of Munich-based VCM Capital Management; and biotechnology consultant and investment adviser Axel Leimer.

The company's founders and the Bonn, Germany-based seed fund High-Tech Gründerfonds participated in the financing round, which includes equity investment, as well as a convertible loan. The company does not plan to raise additional investment finance.

"We think we can be profitable quite soon. We expect to reach break even next year," Jenne said.

It will use the proceeds of the current transaction to hire eight staff and build out its infrastructure. It also is planning to develop similar analytic platforms for additional drug classes, such as protease inhibitors and COX inhibitors, Jenne said.