SOURCE: Coferon, Inc. Coferon Jul 16, 2012 07:30 ET Coferon, Inc. Announces $12 Million Series B Financing Appoints Dr. Colin Goddard as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer STONY BROOK, NY--(Marketwire - July 16, 2012) - Coferon Inc., a privately held, New York-based biotechnology company, today announced that it has closed on a $12 million Series B financing round led by a trio of new venture investors: Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham, N.C.; MedImmune Ventures of Gaithersburg, MD (the corporate venture arm of AstraZeneca Ltd); and Ascent Biomedical Ventures of New York, N.Y. Coincident with the financing, Dr. Colin Goddard, who had been acting as a part-time Executive Chairman for Coferon and was formerly Chief Executive Officer of OSI Pharmaceuticals, Inc. up until its $4 billion acquisition by Astellas Pharma Inc. in 2010, has agreed to assume the leadership of the Company as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The financing comes after a technically successful early investor phase in which the Company has been able to demonstrate initial proof-of-concept for the coferon approach, which uses the Company's proprietary bioorthogonal linker chemistry to deliver small molecules in component parts that are designed to self assemble on their target inside the cell -- creating therapeutic molecules with enhanced size, potency and selectivity. Coferon is applying the technology against an anti-infectives target and in a comprehensive program targeting intracellular epigenetic regulatory proteins and their Protein Interaction Domains (PIDs). The greater binding footprint conferred by coferon dimers can potentially yield much higher binding affinities and more selective modulation of the individual members of closely related families of epigenetic regulatory binding domains such as the BRD family. Therapeutics targeting the BRD family, most notably BRD4, are being actively pursued by many companies with classic small molecule approac