BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - METabolic EXplorer, a young French company exploring the metabolic pathways of bacteria, yeasts and plants to develop new processes for synthesizing chemicals by fermentation, completed a second funding round that brought it €6 million from five French venture capital funds.

The lead investor was Crédit Lyonnais Private Equity, of Paris. Other participants were SPEF Venture, also of Paris; Sofimac, of Clermont-Ferrand; Viveris Management, of Marseille; and FPCR Gestion, a fund managed by Paris-based CDC PME. The president of METabolic EXplorer, Benjamin Gonzalez, declined to say how much each institution invested or what the distribution of shareholdings is, but told BioWorld International that the founders now hold less than 50 percent of the shares.

METabolic, which is based in Clermont-Ferrand, was founded in July 1999 with seed capital of €150,000 and completed an initial funding round in October 2000 that netted it €1.5 million. The first round investors were SPEC Venture and Sofimac.

The company is developing new microbial strains for the production of fine chemicals and molecules by fermentation-based processes instead of chemical synthesis. Its activities are aimed at optimizing existing "bioprocesses," as well as developing new ones, and it says its new fermentation processes improve product yield, reduce by-product, save on raw material costs and reduce pollution.

METabolic's technological platform uses a concept for rational strain design in which data generated by its experimental platform are combined with metabolic models from its proprietary bioinformatics system, Metavista. Metavista integrates data from the gene, protein, metabolite and small-molecule levels to provide a picture of molecular mechanisms and metabolic pathways.

The company's technology is underpinned by partnerships in three areas. To support its metabolic profiling platform, it has exclusive agreements for in vivo analysis with Bruker BioSpin Corp., of New Orleans, a leader in NMR instrumentation. In the bioinformatics area, it has exclusive agreements with the University of Siegen, Germany, for predictive modeling, and with the University of Evry, France, for access to genomic and metabolic data of model organisms. And it has access to the bioresources of the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT-1 and IBT-2) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, a research center that has knowledge of biotechnological processes for manufacturing pharmaceutical and chemical products.

In addition, METabolic EXplorer is engaged in scientific collaborations with Degussa AG, of Düsseldorf, Germany covering amino acid fermentation, and with Biogemma, the plant biotechnology subsidiary of the French seed company Limagrain, of Clermont-Ferrand, for the characterization of secondary metabolism in plants for the purpose of identifying seeds with an improved nutritional content.

Gonzalez said the company's primary activity is the development of new processes for patenting, which it can then license out to third parties. The first product of its in-house research will be an organic acid, which METabolic EXplorer hopes to patent toward the middle of 2003. At the same time, it performs fee-for-service activities for chemical companies, although it has only two customers at present.

The funding will be sufficient to see METabolic EXplorer through to break-even in 2005, said Gonzalez, unless it decides to engage in an "external growth operation," in which case it might need to arrange another funding.