Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc. garnered $19 million after closing its second round of venture financing.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which just opened its labs in the past year and vaulted into drug development work based on its understanding of complex sugars, labeled the Series B private equity investment an "up" round.

"At this stage, it does speak to the progress that the company has made," Momenta Chairman and CEO Alan Crane told BioWorld Today. "We're in a very important and fundamental area in biology, but to date it has been a very difficult area - complex sugars."

While knowledge of DNA and protein structure and function has aided drug development, he said parallel progress in sugars has been difficult given a lack of a complete structural chemical understanding.

"But our very fundamental technology allows that for the first time, at the same level of detail that one would analyze protein structures," Crane said, noting that such technology puts Momenta in a position to both develop new drugs and improve existing products.

Working in the latter sphere, he said, could quickly generate products for the company, creating a revenue stream to supplement further discovery work. Crane said that developing an improved therapeutic within its already approved indication circumvents the need for some clinical trials and allows for a quick route to market.

Momenta, which has raised more than $25 million since its 2001 inception, expects to apply a portion of the latest funding to increase such commercial and research initiatives.

"There are a number of existing therapeutics that are sugars or contain them," Crane said. "Most of the therapeutic protein and therapeutic antibody drugs actually contain sugars that are not well characterized. There are a number of opportunities to improve existing drugs and accelerate the path to the clinic or to the marketplace."

The science underlying the company was developed more than 10 years ago by a group of MIT professors, including Ram Sasisekharan, Robert Langer and Ganesh Venkataraman. Momenta's other founder was Christoph Westphal, now its vice chairman and a general partner at venture capital backer Polaris Venture Partners.

Momenta's approach begins with multiple analysis methods into the chemical structure of complex sugar molecules. The company also owns the equivalent of restriction enzymes used to analyze the sequences of sugars. Momenta then applies methods for using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance for further insight into sugars.

"It's really a fundamentally different way to think about this problem, compared to DNA and proteins," Venkataraman told BioWorld Today.

Built from its technology, Momenta's pipeline focuses on oncology, thrombosis, therapeutic protein engineering and noninvasive drug delivery. Crane said the portfolio includes a mix of new products and improved versions of existing drugs. Its oncology products have shown activity, and the thrombosis products are focused on heparins, which Crane called poorly characterized sugars. Momenta also is developing improvements to glycoproteins, and is using sugars as molecular transport agents to carry drugs through mucosal membranes, such as delivering proteins to the lungs.

"We haven't publicly announced the specifics of where our different projects stand," he said. "But in a reasonably short period of time we will have projects in clinical trials based on this array of opportunities, as well as marketing applications for improvements to existing products where we are not required to do full clinical trials."

Down the road, Crane said Momenta would partner some development projects while keeping others in-house. He added that partnering plans would supplement the latest cash infusion, which is expected to last about three years.

Such expanded initiatives require additional personnel, and since moving into its labs, Momenta has grown from six to 26 employees. The company said it plans to spend a portion of its latest funding to expand its staff across all areas of its business - discovery and clinical research, marketing, manufacturing and regulatory employees figure in the mix.

"We have built a cross-functional organization focused on the nature of the opportunity for us here - not only a discovery-phase opportunity but a development and commercial opportunity as well," Crane said.

Boston-based Atlas Venture and London-based MVM Life Science Partners co-led the financing. Returning investors included Princeton, N.J.-based Cardinal Partners and Waltham, Mass.-based Polaris.