High-Tech Gründerfonds, Bayern Kapital and BioM AG to invest in Intana Bioscience GmbH

07-Jul-2009 - Germany

Based on its proprietary fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy (FCCS) Intana offers highly-specific biochemical profiling services for companies in the pharmaceutical, chemical and life science industries. FCCS is an interaction analysis based on a single molecule sensitive spectroscopic approach. The technology is extremely well suited to characterize molecular interactions between active ingredients, targets and off targets in cellular lysates. So far, the technology has been successfully employed for customers from the pharmaceutical industry in their drug discovery and development efforts. FCCS can be employed as an efficient tool to determine dissociation- and rate constants. High-Tech Gruenderfonds (HTGF), Bayern Kapital (SFB) and BioM AG jointly invested a total of 650,000 € in the start-up company.

“Customers benefit from short assay development times, in depth interaction analysis and assay conditions that mimic the natural environment of a drug.” says Dr. Stefan Hannus, founder and managing director of Intana Bioscience GmbH. “Since we can work in cellular lysates our technology circumvents the need of protein purification. In addition, we do not need an activity assay, therefore enabling us to work with targets that cannot be efficiently addressed with current drug discovery technologies.”

Dr. Michael Nettersheim, Investment Manager of the High-Tech Gruenderfonds Management GmbH comments: “It’s anything but new that drug developers demand for technologies which characterize novel compounds much quicker and more precisely. Intana’s FCCS-technology not only shortens development times but also makes any new target easily accessible under almost physiological conditions. Our investment accelerates the development of FCCS into additional and advanced applications.”

Andreas Huber, Investment Manager of Bayern Kapital GmbH, adds: “Intana`s innovative technology helps biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to determine interaction between novel compounds and targets independent of the nature of the molecules and their function. Since protein purification is not required anymore assay development times are shortened which also means to save costs during the expensive drug development process.”

Other news from the department business & finance

More news from our other portals

All FT-IR spectrometer manufacturers at a glance