Drug development company Surface Logix said on Friday it has closed $32 million of a $42-million financing round, anticipating the $10-million difference to come from milestone payments.

New investor Unilever Technology Ventures joined Venrock Associates, Arch Venture Partners, CW Group, HBM Partners, TIAA-CREF, Healthcare Focus Fund, and IntelCapital in the round.

“The team at Surface Logix has demonstrated tremendous progress in rapidly building a pipeline of novel drugs that address very large markets,” said Bryan Roberts, a general partner at Venrock Associates.

“This financing will allow the company to advance several of these exciting compounds through

proof-of-concept, at which point they can attract high-value commercialization partnerships,” he added.

The Boston-based company has a proprietary platform technology developed from surface chemistry research by its founder, Harvard professor George Whitesides, who also helped found Genzyme.

The technology provides finer control over the interactions between small molecules that could prove to be effective drugs and the large molecules of the human body. Surface Logix can thus improve the solubility of drugs, altering their structure in such a way as to allow them to be absorbed through the intestines, and manipulate their potency.

“Using our novel Pharmacomer Technology Platform, we have tapped into a new chemistry space that cannot be accessed using traditional medicinal chemistry practices and have been able to understand and solve many of the chemistry/biology interface problems that have hindered drug development for years,” said Surface Logix CEO Jim Mahoney.

Specifically, the company will use its new financing to push forward its development of a compound named SLx-2101. The potential drug is on course to begin mid-stage clinical trials as a treatment for erectile dysfunction and endothelial dysfunction (problems in the functioning of the thin layer of skin that lines arteries) by the end of the year.

Next year, Surface Logix hopes to start more mid-stage clinical trials for SLx-2101 as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension and congestive heart failure.