BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Anaphore: Narrowing the focus

January 12, 2009 8:00 AM UTC

Anaphore Inc. was founded in late 2007 to commercialize a protein engineering platform that had been the basis of now defunct Borean Pharma A/S. Anaphore believes focusing on specific products against a few carefully selected targets will help it succeed where Borean did not. Last week, the newco completed a $25 million series A round to take its first product into the clinic.

The technology, which Anaphore has named TrimerX, is based on the human protein tetranectin, a trimeric plasminogen-binding protein whose three binding domains each contain five loops. By altering the amino acid sequence of these loops, Borean had developed a library of antibody analogs containing specific binders to virtually any target (see BioCentury, Sept. 27, 2004). ...