BioWorld International Correspondent

Sophion Bioscience A/S raised DKK35 million (US$5 million) in a second financing round supported by a consortium of Scandinavian investors. The fresh injection of cash boosts its total funding to date to about US$8.5 million and will enable the Ballerup, Denmark-based company to bring to market the first major release of its automated screening system for ion channel modulators.

Sophion was formed as a spin-off from CNS drug development firm NeuroSearch A/S, also of Ballerup, in order to commercialize the latter's in-house patch clamp technology for identifying molecules that act on ion channels. (See BioWorld International, June 28, 2000.)

NeuroSearch participated in the latest funding and now holds 21.4 percent of Sophion's equity. The other investors included Scandinavian Life Sciences Venture, of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Copenhagen; and Dansk Kapitalanl g A/S, Dansk Erhvervsinvestering A/S and V kstfonden, all of Copenhagen.

Ion channels are membrane-spanning proteins that govern the electrical activity of cells in response to changing physiological conditions. They play a central role in mediating the effects of signaling molecules and are well established as drug targets, even though their role in disease has not always been clearly understood.

"Many of the well-known ion channel-modulating drugs were discovered without anyone knowing that's how they worked," Sophion CEO Torsten Freltoft told BioWorld International.

Working with ion channel proteins is a laborious process, however, and traditional, manually based patch clamping techniques limit researchers to screening just handfuls of compounds per day. "The market is asking for a higher throughput than you can get with the classical approach," Freltoft said.

The QPatch 16 system, which is slated for introduction in the third quarter, has 16 measurement sites, meaning that up to 16 different cells can be screened in parallel. Depending on the design of the screen, up to five different test compounds can be tested in a single experiment. In total, Freltoft said, the system can perform up to 1,200 functional screens per day. Next stop on the product roadmap is further scale-up.

Sophion's business model is based on sales of the system plus ongoing sales of associated consumables. It also will supply consulting and support services to users. The company is in talks with potential distribution partners in order to give the product a global reach. One competitor already has an offering on the market. Molecular Devices Corp., of Sunnyvale, Calif., introduced its IonWorks HT system in September. "It's not a completely competitive product as it doesn't do real patch clamping as it's understood in the scientific sense," Freltoft said. That product, he said, is more suited to early stage drug discovery, whereas the Sophion technology can uncover more "subtle details" of ion channel behavior.