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Synpromics Raises £5.2M

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Synthetic promoter firm Synpromics announced today that it has completed a £5.2 million ($6.6 million) financing round.

Participants in the round included existing investors Calculus Capital, the Scottish Investment Bank, and private shareholders, the company said.

Synpromics intends to use most of the funding to advance its PromPT synthetic promoter design platform, which allows for the identification of unique gene regulatory sequence elements from natural genome-derived promoters based on the meta-analysis of functional genomics datasets. A portion of the proceeds will also be used to facilitate Synpromics' move into a new purpose-built facility.

"Since our last fundraising round 18 months ago, the business has grown rapidly as we've signed more commercial partnerships with companies in the US and Europe," Synpromics CEO David Venables said in a statement. "We see an exciting opportunity to fund further rapid expansion of our business."

In August 2015, Scotland-based Synpromics received a £2.1 million investment from Calculus Capital. Since then, it has formed a number of collaborative alliances, including ones with Avalanche Biotechnologies, Sartorius Stedim Cellca, Adverum Biotechnologies, and GE Healthcare.

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