VentureBeat

Cellumen, a Pittsburgh developer of instruments and reagents for use in drug discovery, raised $8.7 million in a second financing round. Safeguard Scientifics led the round, joined by PA Early Stage Partners.

Cellumen bills itself as a “cellular systems biology” company, which doesn’t seem to mean much more than that it uses cell cultures to test whether various drug compounds might be worth exploring further — something that many other companies have been doing for years. While systems biology is a real, if still new and often not particularly well-defined, academic field, beware of companies that seize upon it as a hot new buzzword.

For instance, this paragraph from the Cellumen press release raised a red flag for me, because there’s nothing described here that the drug and biotech industries haven’t been doing for a long time:

Cellumen uses cells and surrogate systems to optimize the drug discovery process. The company’s functional biology approach puts a variety of bio-sensors and cell manipulation reagents in different types of cells, and examines their response to drugs and biologics. This measures efficacy and potential toxicity well before entering expensive clinical testing. In addition, it is also projected to improve clinical trial enrollment and increase new drug efficacy by conducting theranostic patient profiles.