Biosciences company secures $31m private placement

Prosetta Biosciences has raised $31 million from a Series D private placement round led by Fred Alger Management, a high-growth focused investment firm with several generalist funds.

Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda and several other undisclosed companies invested in the Californian human and animal diseases pharmaceutical company, alongside Fred Alger. The firm was not available to comment on which fund the investment came from.

The new investments will largely go to research and development geared at animal health, especially central nervous system diseases and disorders. Prosetta uses cell-free protein synthesising systems as a way to identify molecule drugs that can go unnoticed in traditional pharmaceutical testing methods. The company published a paper in the respected journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, which laid out the basis for a molecular anti-viral treatment for rabies and said it was “a different paradigm for drug discovery”.

Prosetta board member and Fred Alger vice-president CJ Sylvester said the firm was interested in “Prosetta’s assembly machine-focused approach to pathway, target and drug discovery across various therapeutic areas,” saying it was “highly novel and disruptive as compared to traditional approaches to drug discovery in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries”.