NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BioNano Genomics today announced it has raised $10 million in financing to support the ongoing development and commercialization of its human genome analysis platform.
Current investors Battelle Ventures, Domain Associates, and Gund Investment participated in the financing, the San Diego-based firm said.
The proceeds will go toward its Irys System. The platform enables direct observation of native genomic structure "through imaging of extremely long molecules," which enables the detection of structural variation "and significantly improves genome assemblies and phasing haplotypes."
Using its IrysChip, the fully automated benchtop instrument uncoils and confines long DNA molecules in Nanochannel Arrays, "where they are uniformly linearized in a highly parallel display for high-resolution, single-molecule imaging," BioNano said.
Additionally, the Irys System, which the firm launched in November, does not use DNA fragmentation or amplification — typical of next-generation sequencing — resulting in sequence information over very long reads ranging from hundreds of kilobases to a megabase, where important sample structural information is preserved, BioNano said.
"We have demonstrated that the Irys System can scale to larger, more complex genomes, including human," BioNano President and CEO Erik Holmlin said in a statement. "Our scientific achievements combined with this new financing pave the way to expand our commercialization efforts and the capabilities of Irys."
BioNano, which previously was called BioNanomatrix, raised $10 million in a Series B-1 round of equity financing in June 2012, and $23.3 million in a Series B round in March 2011.