Life Sciences Partners Announces Eur 3 Million Series A Financing In Peakadilly; Appoints Nick McCooke CEO
The new proceeds will be used to increase the capacity of Peakadilly’s protein biomarker discovery operation based on its proprietary MASStermind™ technology, enabling it to expand its relationships with pharma and diagnostic companies and to accelerate development of its own diagnostic and pharmacodiagnostic products. Coincident with the funding, Peakadilly founder, VIB (Flanders Interuniversity Institute of Biotechnology), completed the contribution in kind to Peakadilly of the core technology underpinning MASStermind.
Nick McCooke, who joins the company as CEO, brings considerable experience in the start-up and growth of biotech and pharma services businesses in Europe, the USA and Japan. As the first CEO of Solexa, he took the ultra-throughput DNA sequencing company from university spinout to its reverse takeover of a US based company and resulting NASDAQ listing. He takes over from founding CEO, Koen Kas, who becomes CSO.
“I am very pleased to be joining Peakadilly at this exciting stage of its development and delighted this comes at the same time as funding from two leading life science investors known for their constructive contribution to company development,” said Nick McCooke. “The company has already cut its teeth on projects with big pharma and the response has been very positive, so I know we have something special. The task is now to build on these excellent foundations including creating long term value from our own product development activities.”
“I believe Peakadilly has a significant commercial opportunity through applying its unique protein biomarker discovery technology both to third party projects and to its own product development,” said Martijn Kleijwegt of LSP. “Their technology represents a significant advance over other approaches. We see good validation from the granted patents and revenue-generating projects with pharma.”
Peakadilly Peakadilly was founded in late 2004 to exploit the protein biomarker discovery technology developed by the group led by Prof Joel Vandekerckhove at VIB and the University of Ghent, Belgium. In this short time, it has successfully implemented the technology, offering significantly higher throughput, dynamic range and sensitivity compared with other approaches, and has obtained significant revenues from multiple projects with big pharma. It applies the technology both to third party projects and to its own projects for developing a new generation of diagnostics and pharmacodiagnostic products.
About Life Sciences Partners LSP is a pan-European life science venture group with offices in Amsterdam, Munich and Boston. The group has invested in over 40 life sciences companies since 1988 and stood at the basis of companies such as Crucell, Rhein Biotech, Pharming and Qiagen. Recent exits include Devgen (Euronext), Jerini (Frankfurt Stock Exchange), DNAge (sold to Pharming) and KuDOS (sold to AstraZeneca). Current portfolio companies include BioXell (Italy), Celmed (Canada), IDEA (Germany), Octoplus (Netherlands), OMS (Belgium), Santarus (USA), and Zealand (Denmark). Recently, LSP received a USD 100 million mandate from Syngenta to invest in US companies active in crop biotechnology, crop protection, professional products and new growth areas such as biomaterials and biofuels, nutrition, health and wellness and animal nutrition and health; this fund is named LSP BioVentures. In total, the LSP Group now has USD 450 million under management. Further information is available at www.lspvc.com.
Contact Info: LSP Life Sciences Partners: Martijn Kleijwegt Managing Partner Tel: + 31 (0) 20 664 5500