Cetek Raises $10 Million To Advance Drug Discovery And Development
Marlborough, MA - Cetek Corporation announced it has raised $10 million to advance its proprietary drug discovery platform and its emerging pipeline of compounds to treat cancer and infectious diseases. The company also announced the formation of a scientific advisory board of world leading experts in oncology, infectious disease, clinical medicine and drug discovery.
Investors participating in the financing included Argonaut Private Equity, Ventry Industries LLC, Gainesbourgh Investments, James L. Waters, and Stata Ventures. All are existing investors in Cetek.
"Cetek has made impressive progress," commented Dr. Barry Berkowitz, President and CEO. "The financing is a vote of confidence in our technology, pipeline and business strategy. The recruitment of a prestigious advisory board underscores our evolution into a discovery and development organization as well as the potential of our approach.
"Our strategy is two-fold," Dr. Berkowitz added, "to leverage our drug discovery technologies through service agreements and collaborations, and to commercialize our compounds through strategic alliances." Cetek is well positioned in the current environment, with pharmaceutical and major biotechnology companies increasingly turning to novel, time and cost efficient approaches to drug discovery and to innovative earlier stage compounds to strengthen their pipelines."
Cetek pursues an integrated approach to drug discovery based upon its proprietary, high throughput capillary electrophoresis (CE Assay) screening technology and novel chemical biology-focused drug source. The CE Assay provides a number of distinct strengths that are particularly useful for drug discovery today. Many of proteomic and genomic targets, such as protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid interactions, and orphan drug targets that have been desirable but challenging for conventional high throughput screening technologies, are now efficiently accessible with the CE Assay. Cetek's proprietary CE Assays are integrated with drug sources, including its proprietary natural product libraries, enabling access to a wide range of chemical diversity for drug discovery.
SOURCE: Cetek