With its core technology having already turned out 12 product candidates, Sopherion Therapeutics Inc. raised $26 million in its first round of financing.

"We're trying to use this money very carefully," said Ronald Goldfarb, president and CEO of Sopherion. "One of our most important things to use the funds for is to do our mission, which is shutting down diseases."

The company was founded in 2001 through a collaboration of Scheer & Co., Children's Hospital Boston and Samy Ashkar, who is now the company's chief scientific officer. New Haven, Conn.-based Sopherion's technology and its product candidates were developed by Ashkar when he was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and at Children's Hospital. The company has subsisted on bridge funding until now.

The funds will be used "appropriately," Goldfarb told BioWorld Today. "Raising this kind of money is a big responsibility."

Sopherion's technology is a combinatorial biomimetic display platform for high-throughput screening. It has platforms based on protein construction and in vitro modification systems. The platforms are designed to identify "molecules that can mimic key types of molecules," Goldfarb said.

"Our approach is like a jigsaw puzzle," he said. "Many people look at one piece at a time. We have a method that views the entire complex picture, but also how the unknown pieces fit together."

Its technology also allows the company to reshape those pieces, he added. Thus far, the platforms have produced 12 candidates in the fields of cancer, asthma, allergy and osteoporosis. The two lead products, ST 100,006 and ST 100,057, are both in oncology. Sopherion expects to start Phase I trials with "006" in 2003 and "057" in 2004.

At 12 employees now and expecting to grow to 30 by the end of the year, Sopherion is fast outgrowing its temporary housing. In April it will move into new space in New Haven, a 25,000-square-foot facility that will house both corporate quarters and laboratory activities.

Other goals for 2003 include pursuing corporate partnerships and expanding intellectual property. It plans to generate revenue eventually through its drug development and it sees itself working with pharmaceutical companies, but it doesn't "plan to license out the technology, per se," Goldfarb said.

However, the planned clinical trials are perhaps the highest near-term hurdle.

"The Phase I trial is very important," Goldfarb said. "Also, completing the preclinical work for [057] in the cancer area. Building the management team is quite critical, as is getting settled in the new office."

Overall, the company is "just entering the rapid phase of expansion," he said, but added, "We believe we have the ability to have a very serious impact on disease progression and quality of life with our programs."

The Series A was led by TL Ventures, of Wayne, Pa. Other investors were HealthCap KB, of Stockholm, Sweden; ProQuest Investments, of Princeton, N.J.; Johnson & Johnson Development Corp., of New Brunswick, N.J.; Intersouth Partners, of Durham, N.C.; Seaflower Ventures, of Waltham, Mass.; Connecticut Innovations Inc., of Rocky Hill, Conn.; and GE Life Science and Technology Finance.