Personal Chemistry Uppsala AB, a privately held Swedish firm that has developed an automated platform for medicinal and combinatorial chemistry, made its first acquisition, ESyTech AB, of Lund, Sweden.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Anders Kvarnstrom, vice president of marketing and business development at Personal Chemistry, told BioWorld International the deal primarily was stock-based.

The merger provides Uppsala-based Personal Chemistry with a downstream technology to offer users of its Coherent Synthesis platform, which combines proprietary techniques with chemistry informatics software, robotic liquid handling and microwave technology to streamline compound generation.

“We have taken away the bottleneck for performing chemical reactions,” Kvarnstrom said. The company said Coherent Synthesis leads to 10- to 100-fold reductions in the time required for chemical reactions, with, in many cases, improved yields. ESyTech, an early stage company, has developed a miniaturized, membrane-based separation technology for automating sample preparation prior to analysis. That is designed to boost customers’ capacity for processing the increased number of samples they generate with the Coherent Synthesis platform.

“We are thinking one step ahead,” Kvarnstrom said.

ESyTech, a spinout from the chemistry department at the University of Lund, is still at the prototype stage. Up to now, its technology has been pitched primarily at users of gas chromatography within the environmental sampling market. But Personal Chemistry will re-orient it toward drug development.

“Exactly the same process and methodology will be applied to HPLC [high-performance liquid chromatography],” Kvarnstrom said. It will be late next year, though, before integration of the two technologies is realized in commercially available products. “Proof of principle is happening as we speak,” he said.

Personal Chemistry, which reported sales of SEK69.2 million (US$6.7 million) in 2001, has so far concentrated on the pharmaceutical industry and claims 17 of the world’s top 20 pharma companies as customers. “We see truly a strong increase in sales to biotechs at this point,” Kvarnstrom said.

The company’s backers include HealthCap, Investor Growth Capital and SEB Foretagsinvest, all of Stockholm, Sweden; 3i plc, of London; and BankInvest Group of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is currently undergoing its third financing round.