NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – ClearLight Diagnostics announced today that it has raised $3.5 million in a Series B financing round.
The round was led by a syndicate of existing investors created by Wiegers Capital Partners.
The company said it will use the proceeds of the financing to continue the development of a technology platform and associated applications using the Clarity lipid-clearing technique developed by company founder Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University, coupled with a microscopy method called clarity optimized light-sheet microscopy (COLM).
The Clarity technique allows for the creation of transparent tissue-gel composites, producing fully assembled, intact tissue, which is permeable to macromolecules and optically transparent. This, in turn, allows for robust three-dimensional imaging of subcellular components and heterogeneous cellular interactions within the tumor microenvironment, the company said. When paired with COLM, the technology gives researchers an in-depth view of key biomarkers from lipid-cleared samples.
"Continuing our development efforts using the ClearLight technology platform in oncology builds on our initial proof-of-concept work to elucidate the three-dimensional architecture of the tumor microenvironment," said ClearLight CEO Sarah McCurdy in a statement. "We are pleased with the ongoing support of our investors who have provided further validation of the potential for the ClearLight technology platform."
The company previously raised $2.5 million in a Series A financing round.
In early November, the company announced it had exclusively licensed a novel microscopy and RNA interrogation technology from Stanford. The microscopy technology — called spherical-aberration-assisted extended depth-of-field, or SPED — combines the large volumetric field of view of an extended depth of field with the optical sectioning of light sheet microscopy, eliminating the need to physically scan the detection objective for volumetric imaging while maintaining spatial resolution.
The RNA interrogation technology enables measurement of activity-dependent transcriptional signatures, cell-identity markers, and diverse non-coding RNAs in rodent and human tissue volumes. It was developed at Stanford for multiplexed, volumetric visualization of both long and short RNAs.
At the time, McCurdy noted that the technology would be helpful to ClearLight in developing the Clarity process and associated technologies.