Quantro: Seed capital by Evotec and Boehringer
Germany's Evotec SE and Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund have acquired equal minority stakes in Quantro Therapeutics GmbH, a recently established research-based biotech company based in Vienna. Evotec also entered into a comprehensive partnership with the Austrian start-up, that strives to discover and develop novel therapeutics interfering with disease-causing transcriptional programmes in cancer and other diseases. The Germans will provide hit identification services for Quantro's proprietary anti-tumour projects.
Quantro will combine and exploit innovative functional-genetic and transcriptomic technologies to generate a drug discovery pipeline that will transform the precision and scope of cell-based compound screens. By introducing Transcriptional Fingerprinting to drug discovery, the young company intends to revamp the scope of pharmacologic interventions in a variety of cellular, target and disease contexts. A prime focus will be the discovery and development of drug candidates blocking the activity of oncogenic transcription factors, a class of particularly promising therapeutic targets that has so far been deemed undruggable.
Founded by Dr Stefan Ameres and Dr Johannes Zuber as a spin-off from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Quantro is headed by Chief Executive Officer Dr Dieter Nachtigall. The company is located in the Vienna Biocenter.
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Romain Buisson
Confo Therapeutics NV
AC Immune SA