NEW YORK – Startup Spear Bio announced Monday that it has raised $45 million in a Series A funding round. The Woburn, Massachusetts-based firm plans to use the funds to accelerate development and manufacturing capacity for its ultrasensitive immunoassays that use standard qPCR instruments for readout.
The oversubscribed round was co-led by Foresite Capital and Bio-Techne with additional participation from existing investors including Maverick Ventures, Yonjin Capital, and CDH Investments. In addition, Vikram Bajaj, managing director of Foresite Capital, has joined the company’s board of directors.
"This funding will allow us to accelerate our assay menu expansion and commercial offerings to solve challenges in protein research and early disease diagnostics," said Feng Xuan, cofounder and CEO of Spear Bio.
Founded in 2021, Spear Bio claims its technology can provide attomolar-level detection of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter sample volume. It uses Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction, or SPEAR, technology exclusively licensed from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.
The SPEAR approach incorporates target-binding probes that bind to proximal sites in a protein's structure, the firm said in a statement. Spear Bio said the technology offers a three-step, wash-free workflow and can be run from a less than 1 microliter sample volume.
"This double-tagging event enables the two specially designed probes to "shake hands" multiple times under a time-controlled manner to ensure true target-induced proximity and synthesize a unique DNA sequence, which can then be amplified and quantified using a standard qPCR instrument," Bio-Techne said in a separate statement.
Bio-Techne added that the technology is ideal for measuring low-abundance biomarkers in neurology, inflammation, and oncology, adding that the initial offering will focus on key biomarkers supporting translational research in Alzheimer's disease.
Kim Kelderman, president and CEO of Bio-Techne, said that "Spear Bio's ultra-sensitive detection technology offers significant advantages over conventional immunoassay and next-gen proteomic technologies, enabling the quantification of mere dozens of protein molecules in a sample. This level of sensitivity unlocks several challenging applications and high growth markets, including early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases."