Prolog : News : St. Louis Post-Dispatch : 06 08 07

06 08 07 | St. Louis Post-Dispatch article by Rachel Melcer

Medical Research Firm Lands $19.1 Million

Singulex Inc. said Thursday that it has raised $19.1 million in venture capital, which will help it develop and market ultra-sensitive tests for detecting a broad array of diseases.

The company has a 10-person research team based at the Center for Emerging Technologies biotech incubator in St. Louis, where it was founded; another nine employees work at Singulex's commercial operations base in Hayward, Calif.

With this additional funding, both sides will grow, said president and chief executive Philippe Goix.

"We're very excited about the prospects," he said. "And we are very committed to building the value in the Midwest."

Singulex has developed technology that can detect individual molecules of proteins or metabolites in small samples of fluid, such as blood — which lets doctors and drug researchers spot the presence, or absence, of a disease state much earlier than previously had been possible.

This is useful in a number of ways, Goix said.

For example, doctors commonly check for the presence of a protein, cardiac troponin, in the blood of patients who complain of acute heart pain. The protein is produced by dying heart muscle during a heart attack. But they had no way of detecting tiny levels of this protein that may be present before a heart attack has occurred — until Singulex developed the technology.

By using the Singulex system, doctors may be able to take preventive measures in patients who are on the road to a heart attack before one occurs, Goix said.

Singulex is working with Washington University School of Medicine to develop a range of clinical tests, he said.

These will need to go through the lengthy process of obtaining Food and Drug Administration approval before hitting the market.

In the meantime, Singulex is selling its technology for use in drug discovery and research. It has a number of pilot programs under way with big pharmaceutical companies, Goix said.

The Singulex testing system can screen patients who may want to enroll in a clinical trial for previously undetectable risk factors. Those who are at risk of a complication can be kept out of a study, protecting them as well as the drug candidate's chance for regulatory success.

Pharmaceutical companies also can use the test to show when a treatment is effective. In cancer trials, for example, regulators often look at five-year survival rates to determine success. If drug makers can show an absence of cancer-indicating biomarkers in a patient's blood sooner, they might win over regulators and get the treatment to market in much less time.

"A huge, hot area of research now is in biomarkers, because it fits with all we've learned about genomics and proteomics and all of those things," said Marcia Mellitz, president of the Center for Emerging Technologies. "You need these kinds of instruments that can be used along with the discoveries. So it's really very exciting."

Clayton-based Prolog Ventures has been an investor in Singulex since it was created. It participated in this latest round of funding along with another Clayton firm, Advantage Capital Partners, and Wisconsin-based Fisk Ventures. OrbiMed Advisors LLC of New York, a firm with more than $6 billion in health care assets under management, led the financing.

"We consider it one of the stars in our portfolio," said Prolog managing director Greg Johnson.

He is pleased to see OrbiMed join the funding syndicate.

"They can look at deals all over the world and pick and choose," he said.

Singulex has "seven-digit" revenue, Goix said, without being more specific.

In the next two to three years, Singulex hopes to begin moving into the human diagnostics market, Johnson said. "The research market can be quite good, but for this company I think ultimately it should be in human, clinical testing."

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