The financing will fund the company through 2010. It will be used to advance Apoptos’s portfolio of small molecule drugs that are directed at inducing tumor cell apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death.
William Rastetter, CEO and chairman of the board of Apoptos, said: “Evasion of apoptosis allows cancer cells to survive and become malignant tumors. Directly activating programmed cell death within tumors promises to yield novel drugs that potently and selectively kill cancer cells and bypass classical drug resistance mechanisms.”