SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Sequenta, Inc., a molecular diagnostics platform company focused on immune system profiling, announced today that the company has raised $13 million in funding. The Series B round was led by a consortium including venture funds Index Ventures and Series A investor Mohr Davidow Ventures, and other individual investors including Jacob Goldfield.
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The new funds will be used to continue development and commercialization of molecular diagnostic assays based on a proprietary sequencing approach to the profiling T and B cell receptor repertoires.
“The profound revolution in DNA sequencing technologies has enabled fundamentally new measurements of the most variable region of the human genome: the genes that target foreign antigens in the body as part of the adaptive immune system,” said Tom Willis, Sequenta CEO. “Unlike your inherited DNA sequence, these sequences are constantly changing as your immune system adapts to the environment. Sequenta has developed an assay that is capable of measuring the antigen receptor sequences of the millions of white blood cells that are found in circulation using a scalable high throughput assay.”
Sequenta’s products will ultimately enable new paradigms in the treatment of diseases as diverse as infection, auto-immune disease and cancer by providing diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring tests to enable better targeting of therapies to achieve better clinical outcomes.
“Current technologies for monitoring the immune system cannot distinguish between the total level of immune activity and the specific immune activity. Today, balancing the amount of therapy at any given time is an art rather than a science due to the lack of specific molecular tools,” explained Rowan Chapman, a Sequenta board member and Mohr Davidow partner.
Jacob Goldfield added, “There’s great demand for better diagnostics. Based on Sequenta’s strong science and the founding team’s history of commercializing new technologies, the company is well positioned to reshape the treatment and monitoring of immune related disease.”
ABOUT SEQUENTA
Sequenta, Inc. (formerly MLC Dx, Inc.) is a privately held company developing and commercializing molecular diagnostic assays based on a proprietary sequencing approach to the profiling of T and B cell receptor repertoires. The company was founded in 2008 by Tom Willis and Malek Faham, two entrepreneurs who previously founded ParAllele BioScience, a company that developed and commercialized genomic technologies. ParAllele was acquired by Affymetrix in 2005.Sequenta’s investors include Mohr Davidow and Index Ventures. The company is based in San Francisco, Calif., More information can be found at www.sequentainc.com.
SOURCE Mohr Davidow
