SomaLogic Inc. raised $19.5 million in its Series C round and is looking to apply its products to the promise of proteomics.

A round led by insiders, the Series C included Mitsui & Co. Ltd., of Japan, a company with which it collaborates, and gives Boulder, Colo.-based SomaLogic a raised-to-date total of about $44 million, having pulled in $4 million in its Series A and about $20 in its Series B.

The funding, said SomaLogic CEO David Brunel, will be used for the company's aptamer technology.

"We'll use it primarily for working capital, research and development and commercialization," he said. "This should take us, at our current plan, through the end of 2004."

Founded in January 2000, SomaLogic is based on technology from Larry Gold, the company's chairman and chief science officer. Gold was chairman at Boulder-based NeXagen Inc., which merged with Vestar Inc. and became NeXstar Pharmaceuticals Inc. NeXstar, in turn, was bought by Foster City, Calif.-based Gilead Sciences Inc. in 1999 for about $550 million in stock. SomaLogic then approached Gilead for the rights to use the technology in its own platform. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 23, 1995, and March 2, 1999.)

Today SomaLogic has its PhotoSELEX technology, an in vitro combinatorial chemistry technique used to identify photoaptamers to specific targets, as well as photoaptamer arrays designed to allow the simultaneous measurement of the concentrations of proteins in a range of sample types. With 50 employees, the company is "heavily focused on building commercial relationships with life science reagent and instrumentation companies to help us commercialize [our technology] in the life science market," Brunel told BioWorld Today.

In an untimely period in which to seek an initial public offering, Brunel said SomaLogic has a "small but growing stream of revenue from a variety of relationships" that he said should "help us offset costs" as the company progresses. In late January it reported a deal with Merial Ltd., which has offices worldwide but with U.S. headquarters in Duluth, Ga. The companies agreed to collaborate on aptamer-based diagnostics for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, although financial terms were not disclosed.

Brunel said SomaLogic is "one of a half dozen companies that has been trying to create a multiplexed protein analysis tool with ELISA [enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay]-like performance" that will "help the revolution in proteomics move forward aggressively."

"We think we have the right technology for doing that," he said.

The genomics revolution that heated up in the late 1990s has lost some luster as drug miners did not strike as quickly as hoped, and realized that information on proteins was an essential next step after getting genomics information. Proteomics has taken on some of the glow that perhaps genomics has lost, although it has yet to prove itself through approved drugs.

Calling proteomics "a step away" from the genomics revolution, Brunel said the best is yet to come.

"I think that the promise [of proteomics] has been impaired by the quality of the tools in the past, and I think that as those tools develop and mature, you'll see that promise start to be delivered," Brunel said. "And when the tools start to mature there will be significant value, and you'll see the tools market grow the way it was projected to."