It's been a bountiful holiday season for Amphora Discovery Corp., which earlier this month raised $23 million in a Series B round of financing.

President and CEO Martin Haslanger told BioWorld Today the company fortified investor confidence after quickly achieving its early goals in demonstrating the utility of its multidimensional lead-generation approach. Amphora, formed to create and commercialize a database of chemical genomics information for use in preclinical drug discovery to accelerate target validation and lead identification, said its process rapidly generates selective drug-like molecules for therapeutic targets.

"I think we actually exceeded our expectations in terms of the capabilities that we'd be able to achieve and understand the capacity that's scalable," he said. "The investment group appreciated what we are doing and recognized that we have achieved milestones, and sees that additional investment in the current environment is in everybody's best interest to demonstrate commercialization."

The financing was co-led by existing investors ARCH Venture Partners, of Chicago; MPM Capital, of Boston; Venrock Associates, of New York; CW Group, of New York; and Versant Ventures, of Menlo Park, Calif.

The Series A round of investment, worth $25 million, was completed just over a year ago, in conjunction with the Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based company's founding. Amphora was spun out of Caliper Technology Corp., of Mountain View, Calif. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 28, 2001.)

The privately held firm said it would use the funds to expand and commercialize its multidimensional drug discovery products. Specifically, Haslanger said Amphora plans to stretch the latest cash infusion for two years, directing the funds toward investigation of target classes such as kinases, phosphatases and ion channels. The company then will combine the targets with its library to produce drug candidates.

"We've demonstrated that we can generate very high-quality data, very efficiently, so that you can look at a molecule from many dimensions from the beginning, in terms of drug discovery," he added. "Basically, the platform works, and now we're moving to the products. We feel you need to demonstrate that you have both the technology platform and a product, and this money will help us demonstrate the product piece."

Amphora combines its library and microfluidic assay technology with its data analysis software to measure chemical activity across related target groups and disease pathways. Amphora said the data's sensitivity allows it to design structure activity relationship models and tune compound selectivity directly.

While Haslanger declined to specify the direction of Amphora's internal projects, he said the targets are well validated and important in cancer, inflammation and diabetes. The 60-person company plans to work in concert with partners in collaborative drug development processes, but also use its technology to develop internal products down the road.

"As we look at our library and perhaps [our partners'] libraries, we'll gain information so that we'll create assets of our own, on which we will make key decisions on how far we take them ourselves and when we partner them," Haslanger said, adding that the company is involved in preliminary discussions with three potential pharmaceutical partners.

Possible partnerships could involve investigating whole families of targets or specific targets themselves.

"And as we do collaborations, we will generate assets," he added. "We expect by the end of 2003 to have molecules or collections of molecules that we would partner with or sell to pharmaceutical companies."

Amphora was spun out of work developed at Caliper by Michael Knapp and Jim Knighton. Another founder, Nicholas Hodge, left Caliper to join Amphora, with William Janzen and Haslanger also coming on board at the outset.