TORONTO, ONTARIO, Sept 15, 2014 – AbCelex Technologies Inc., a privately-held biotechnology company, committed to the discovery and development of innovative solutions to advance the health of food animals and human food safety, today announced it has closed an additional $1M in Series A venture capital financing. The financing was provided by Pinetree Capital Corporation and a private investor. The funds will be used to fund continuing research and development of the company’s antibody based approach to control a number of pathogens in farm animals implicated in a variety of food-borne illnesses. The Company anticipates that its advanced antibody screening and expression platform will address multiple pathogens in food animals. Currently there are no cost-effective, at source methods to control Campylobacter and Salmonella in poultry. AbCelex believes its solutions will offer an alternative to the use of antibiotics as a growth promoter in farm animals. In the U.S. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 25% of reported cases of Campylobacteriosis and up to 8% of Salmonellosis cases are antibiotic resistant1.
“This is an exciting time to become involved with AbCelex. The Company’s disruptive technology has the potential to dramatically improve food animal health and quality of food for the world’s population” said Mathew Wilson, Vice President at Pinetree Capital. “In the poultry industry alone, with over forty billion broilers harvested each year, AbCelex’s anti-microbial feed additives have huge market potential.”
“With financial support from Pinetree, we’ll be able to accelerate our pipeline of R&D programs and strengthen our intellectual property position”, said Dr. Babaei, President & CEO of AbCelex. “We’ll continue to build on our revolutionary antibody engineering techniques, advance our protein expression systems and complete our initial field trials by the end of this year”.
Previously, AbCelex Technologies Inc. secured $2M in Series A financing from Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, LP, a Chicago based agriculture and biotech fund.
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