Madison, WI-based Invenra has raised more than $3 million from 27 investors, according to a document filed with federal securities regulators.
Mark Kubik, the company’s vice president of business development, says that some of the money will go toward fulfilling agreements it’s made with drug companies, including U.K.-based Oxford BioTherapeutics, which Invenra announced it had partnered with last year.
Invenra’s cell-free protein expression technology allows for the screening of hundreds of thousands of full antibodies, and is much faster than conventional cell-based methods for finding therapeutic antibodies.
The company’s core business model involves licensing its technology to drug makers, Kubik says. With these deals, the pharmaceutical partner owns and is responsible for developing the antibody products.
However, Kubik says that Invenra is also exploring the possibility of forging agreements where it would be responsible for providing some of the resources to develop molecules—people and money, namely—and ultimately get to share in the rights to drug candidates.
Read more at Xconomy.