Amicus Therapeutics said Wednesday it will seek to raise $86 million in an IPO.

The Cranbury, New Jersey, biotech company said Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Pacific Growth Equities will manage the offering. Until now, Amicus has raised $55 million through three rounds of venture capital financing since it was formed in 2002.

Amicus has an unusual approach to treating genetic diseases in which essential proteins made in the body don’t fold up into the correct configuration. This results in a shortage of the working protein, often an enzyme, so most treatments try to supply more of it.

Instead, Amicus has a technology to help the misfolded proteins refold properly. It specializes in a type of molecule found in cells called chaperones, whose normal job is to assist in the folding of some complex proteins and to sort out misfolded proteins.

At present the company is focusing its efforts on new drugs to treat Fabry disease and Gaucher disease. Both are characterized by a deficiency in an enzyme which prevents an area of the cell called the lysosome from performing its normal functions.

“This is a potentially groundbreaking advance that may transform the way we treat a wide range of genetic diseases,” Arthur Horwich, an Amicus advisor and professor of genetics and pediatrics at Yale University, said in response to the launch of midstage trials of Amicus’s experimental Fabry disease drug, Amigal.

“The demonstration of increased enzyme activity in the health volunteers [in the first clinical trial] is intriguing,” added another Amicus advisor, Michel Bouvier, professor of biochemistry at the University of Montreal. “If these data are replicated, pharmacological chaperones may be applicable to therapeutic indications beyond the specific genetic disorders targeted today.”

The company expects its second pipeline drug, called AT2101, to begin clinical trials in the second half of 2006.