Intana raises €650K for biochemical profiling

Funding

High-Tech Gruenderfonds, Bayern Kapital and BioM AG have jointly invested a total of €650,000 in the start-up of Intana, a company applying proprietary fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy (FCCS) to provide highly-specific biochemical profiling services for pharmaceutical, chemical and life science companies.

FCCS is an extremely sensitive analysis technique that can be used to characterise individual molecular interactions between active ingredients and targets and non-targets in cellular lysates. The technology has been successfully applied to pharmaceutical industry drug discovery and development.

“Customers benefit from short assay development times, in-depth interaction analysis and assay conditions that mimic the natural environment of a drug.” said Stefan Hannus, founder and managing director of Intana Bioscience GmbH. “Since we can work in cellular lysates, our technology circumvents the need for 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.”

The funding will enable Intana to expand the application of its technology into additional fields, with the aim of establishing and developing a range of services for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Michael Nettersheim, Investment Manager of High-Tech Gruenderfonds Management, said the need for new drug discovery technologies to characterise novel compounds quickly and more precisely is well recognised. “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.”