Oct. 13--JUPITER -- In a boost for the area's biotech industry, a start-up firm said Tuesday it has set up shop in Jupiter -- and it boasts $8 million in venture capital and the imprimatur of a Nobel Prize winner.

The new company, Envoy Therapeutics, said it raised $8 million in a private placement led by 5AM Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

One of its four founders is Nobel laureate Paul Greengard. A neuorscience professor at Rockefeller University in New York, Greengard shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two others for discovering how dopamine, among other things, affects the nervous system.

Envoy's Web site said it will try to develop drugs for schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, drug addiction, epilepsy, anxiety and depression and other disorders. The research will focus on identifying proteins in the brain that can be targeted by new drugs.

"They have a way of dealing with individual brain cell genes," said Richard Lerner, president of The Scripps Research Institute. "They find proteins produced in very specialized areas of the brain."

The company likely will set up shop at Alexandria Real Estate Equities' biotech incubator in Jupiter, Lerner said.

Envoy's Web site says it's hiring a vice president of drug discovery (doctorate required), a corporate controller (CPA required) and a bioinformatics scientist (master's degree required).

Envoy is just the sort of company state and county officials hoped to attract when they spent hundreds of millions to lure Scripps and the Max Planck Institute to Jupiter.

"That could really propel things, because it would bring scientists and technicians," said Stanley Kim, a patent attorney and biotech entrepreneur in Wellington who's vice chairman of the life sciences committee of the county's Business Development Board. "One of the issues has been when will we get a return as a community for our investment in Scripps and Max Planck, and if that $8 million is going to be invested here, that's a huge thing."

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