NEW YORK – Genialis said Wednesday that it has closed a Series A funding round worth more than $13 million.
Taiwania Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund were co-leaders of the round, with participation from previous investors First Star Ventures, Redalpine Venture Partners, and Pikas. New shareholders P5 Health Ventures and several angel investors also contributed.
As a result of the investments, Ita Lu of Taiwania and Hamzeh Abdul-Hadi of Debiopharm are joining the board of Genialis as directors.
The bioinformatics firm, with twin headquarters in Boston and in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has been developing cancer patient classifiers, based on machine learning and high-throughput omics data, to help predict response to targeted therapies. Genialis said that it will use the new capital to improve its ResponderID technology platform and to expand its catalog of clinically validated biomarker models. So far, the firm has used its technology to analyze clinical trial data for biopharma companies in order to inform future trial designs and to support diagnostic companies' commercialization of biomarker assays.
Genialis said that ResponderID can read "virtually any" biomarker from next-generation sequencing to provide a molecular portrait of disease phenotypes to clinical and translational researchers.
The decade-old company, which raised a $2.3 million seed round in 2017, said it plans to grow its teams in the US and Slovenia, expand its advisory boards, and invest in R&D collaborations with cancer centers, hospital groups, and clinical academic labs.