Proteus International Plc coming to the Unlisted Securities Market via a placing later this month of 25% of the equity to raise UKP4m and give it a market capitalisation of UKP18m, and seeking to raise UKP4m. Proteus is based in Marple, Cheshire and specialises in computer software for the modelling of biomolecular structures and drug design. Despite having made a loss of UKP588,000 in the year to September 1989, it expects to report profits of UKP3m on turnover of UKP5.1m for the 15 months to March 31 1990. The company was established in April 1987 by Imseco, a health care research company, to develop an intelligent program that could automatically analyse, model and design new molecules. In April 1990, there was a share exchange by the management of Imseco and Proteus, and several key members of a team at the University of Manchester involved in computer-aided molecular analysis now head Proteus’ development efforts. Over the past three years the company has developed the Prometheus suite of software programs for molecular design. It is written in Fortran 77 and is portable to any hardware running Fortran. BioEngine is a package comprising the Prometheus software and supercomputer hardware. Proteus has also developed a fifth generation language called Global which is used in the Prometheus software to execute instructions issued in any natural language, and Protean II is a personal computer-based system used to manipulate and analyse protein sequence data. Several multi-national companies are currently testing and evaluating that product. Proteus says that its three main areas of business are the direct sale of Prometheus and BioEngine; contract design consultancy for companies such as Merck Sharp & Dohme Ltd; and the design of proprietary products using Bioengine which are subsequently licensed to pharmaceutical companies. The company stresses that it does not manufacture or market drugs to the end user, but sells drug designs to manufacturers for either fixed fees or royalties. It has worked with Ciba-Geigy AG in Switzerland, and is currently involved with a number of major drug companies including Peptide Technology of Australia and Johnson & Johnson. The joint venture with Peptide and Johnson focuses on an HIV compound that is said to produce neutralising antibodies to the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The share issue – not yet priced – is being handled by Allied Provincial Securities Ltd.
